Nikon Coolpix S1000pj

Shooting Modes (11.66)

The S1000pj includes a lot of scene modes, accessed by pressing the scene button on the back of the camera. For fully automatic use, there is a full auto mode, a smart portrait mode and a subject tracking mode. The smart portrait mode uses both face tracking and smile detection to try and take a photo when the subject is smiling. This is unusual in that it allows you to decide which face is the trigger: useful if you have kids and want to get them smiling, but aren’t too worried about the grandparents. you can also add skin smoothing and other processing, as well as blink detection, which flags up a warning of a subject was blinking when the shot was taken.

The subject tracking mode is also useful for children. In this mode, you select a subject to focus on, and the camera attempts to keep that object in focus as it moves around the frame. We found that this had only limited success: the camera wasn’t able to track fast-moving objects such as animals and small children. But it worked well with older children and other less animated objects.

Missing from this camera is any sort of manual mode; there is no way to set the shutter speed or aperture directly.

Auto Mode Features

Focus – The S1000pj offers four focus modes: face detection, auto, manual and center. It defaults to the face detection mode. We found that the focus was a little slow to snap into place: it often took a couple of seconds to snap into place. A red LED on the left side of the front of the camera works as an AF illuminator in low light.

Exposure – The S1000pj offers exposure compensation of up to 2 stops up or down, in 1/3 of a stop steps. It does not offer exposure bracketing, though.

Metering – The S1000pj offers no metering modes: you cannot set it to use spot, center weighted or other modes of metering. The only option you get to control metering is to choose a scene mode that meters the scene correctly.

Aperture – The 5X zoom lens built into this camera has an extremely limited aperture range: f/3.9 to f/5.5. That means it can’t open the aperture up to gather more light, or stop it down to increase the depth of focus in an image.

Shutter Speed – The shutter speed range of the S1000pj is also limited: it can go from 1/1500 down to 2 seconds in program mode, and out to 4 seconds in the fireworks scene mode.

Self Timer – Two options are available for the self timer: a 10 second and a 2 second delay. In addition, the smile detection focus mode does allow you to automatically take a photo when the chosen subject is smiling.

Scene Modes

There are also 17 scene modes available, which include the usual suspects: portrait landscape, snow, party, etc. There is also an automatic scene mode option that automatically chooses the scene mode based on what the camera detects.

Picture Effects (4.00)

The S1000pj offers a few different color modes that allow you to change the colors in an image. Examples of all of them are shown below.

Picture Samples
Standard Vivid Black and White Sepia Cyanotype More...

Manual Controls (4.44)

There are the common white balance options: you can leave it on auto or set it to any of 5 presets (including one for flash). Unusually for a point and shoot camera, there is also a mode called preset manual, where you measure the white balance from a white object in the frame.

Drive/Burst Mode (0.78)

The S100pj has a couple of tricks up its sleeve when taking several shots together: as well as the standard continuous shooting mode, it offers a mode called BSS (Best Shot Selector), which takes up to 10 shots, but only saves the sharpest single shot. It also offers a mode called Multi 16, which takes 16 smaller shots and composites them together into a single .

Shot to Shot (3.0)

We found the continuous mode of the S100pj to be very slow; we measured it at 0.77 frames a second. It could also only manage a short burst of 4 frames at this speed: subsequent s were shot at a much slower rate as the camera had to pause and write the s out to memory.