Nikon Coolpix S620

Opinion: Don't buy this camera if you plan on using flash. See "Problems encountered" below.

I bought this for my wife last summer as a tiny carry-everywhere camera. However she never uses the camera because of the severity of the flash problem.

I use DSLRs so I wasn't expecting the IQ to be very good on the tiny S620, but it is definitely better than I was expecting. The noise is less than I expected (but of course it's still a lot worse than any large-sensor camera / DSLR). The colours are perfectly acceptable. The resolution and sharpness are not bad at all. I give the S620 a good rating for its compactness, light weight, and detailed IQ.

Ease of use is all fine except for its one major drawback which is the killer: you cannot get good results with the flash.

I have now bought her an OLYMPUS E-PL1, and although it's bigger and heavier than the Nikon s620, the Olympus quality is as good as a DSLR, and we have had no problems with indoor/flash photos.

Opinion: To add to this review, I dropped that camera at Disney, The best thing that could
have happen to it. It will be a while before I try another Nikon PS. But the D90 is
still going strong and it was a great buy...

Well I picked this camera because I have had a number of sony's and all have lasted
less then two years, BUT the image quality has been very good for a piont and
shoot. My last nikon P&S was the coolpix 950, and my guess because the number
of the camera goes down so does the image.
First off I am a Nikon guy, have been for 35 years. Its hard for me to give this
review. But the image quality is poor and so is the color, its not sharp and the AF
stinks.
I think you have to settle for sony and short life and good image or just poor
quality with other P&S.
I hope nikon will do something about this and makes some serious changes with
there low end cameras. There DSLR are still the best.

Opinion: after five Canon SD ponit & shoot cameras, I decided to give Nikon a try. I didn't have too much expectations to begin with so not a much of disappointment per se.

S620 has good combination of features, lens, size, and price point. It is ok for very casual shootings such as travel.

There are several short comings that users should be aware:

(1) this is a VERY slow camera --- start up, focusing, and image processing. At times I couldn't use it at all because of the waiting. The slow focusing renders MANY blurry photos.

(2) images are VERY noisy in low light. I normally set ISO at "auto" and most night shoots came with ISO around 300/400. They are very soft and noise.

Conclusion, after this interesting 'adventure', I am switching back to Canon for P&S.

Opinion: I will bring this camera back to the store. I bought it to replace a stolen SD870/Ixus 860, but it can't match regarding colour. The colour quality of the S620 is disappointing, and in my opinion the colour quality of skin unacceptable. I used a Coolpix 3200 (3 mega pixels, my son has it now) which has, hands down, better image quality. Sometime more mega pixels is worse!

Pros:

The controls and menus are good, e.g. always direct control over exposure compensation.
Start up time is very, very short!

Used for 6 days: people, nature, textile crafts, snapshots.

Used before:
Coolpix 990 - Powershot A80 - Coolpix 3200 - Finepix 9000 - Ixus 860 / SD 870 - D50

Opinion: This cam takes really sharp pics for a nikon point and shoot. For once it actually beats a canon ixus in terms of image quality. The wide angle has quite decent control on the distortions. i'm impressed as compared even to a DSLR.

Opinion: I wanted a compact digital as I found I wasn't using my Olympus 7070 as much as I should. So much easier to have a little P&S in your pocket than have a larger camera slung around your neck.
Secondly, I plan on taking the camera on an extended vacation, so it had to be small.

A Wide-Angle was a must, as was some degree of control over the camera, specifically ISO, White Balance & Exposure Compensation.

Chose the S620 as it has the features I wanted at a good price point. Checked out the Fuji F200EXR, but I wasn't that impressed with the build quality - it seemed to clunky to my hands. The Panasonic's were pretty good, but the stories of excessive noise put me off somewhat.

PROS:
- Good build quality
- Very compact
- Nice 2.7" LCD Screen
- ISO, Shutter & Aperture displayed when focusing
- Four AF Area modes including Manual & Face Priority
- Options for Metering, Continuous Shooting & Colors
- Sensible zoom lens (28-112mm), reasonably fast f2.7
- Well laid out intuitive controls
- Shutter lag not a problem
- Good image quality. Photos are sharp, acceptable noise
- "D-Lighting" edit works quite well in playback mode
- Considering file size of 12M photos camera records files quickly enough. Note: I bought a Patriot 8GB Class 6 SDHC card.
- Ability to record images at 12, 8, 5, 3MP resolutions

CONS:
- Annoyingly limited to 4:3 Aspect Ratio at all image resolutions except one
- No HD Movie capability
- No Full PASM control