Nikon Coolpix S2

Auto Mode (6.0)
Ironically, the most manual control available on the S2 is offered in the camera’s Auto mode. Within this mode, the exposure compensation, white balance, and ISO sensitivity can be adjusted. The scene modes automate everything according to a specific lighting situation, but the automatic mode is the cover-all. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. When I attempted to take pictures of my new favorite subject, my three-month-old. I snapped some pictures and found that his arms were blurry from his constant thrashing, despite the presence of the Blur Warning. Sometimes the warning would appear and other times the S2 would just snap the shot and I’d find the blurriness in playback mode.

Movie Mode (4.5)
The Nikon Coolpix S2’s QuickTime movie mode is grainy and not very smooth with its 15 frame per second rate. It does offer three size options of 640 x 480, 320 x 240, and 160 x 120. There is also a time lapse movie option in full resolution. There is a tiny amount of digital zoom in movie mode, but it only distorts the picture even more. Audio is recorded, but it is not of very high quality; there is a constant background noise that sounds like a light wind.

The time lapse movie option is the most interesting feature, but perhaps the most useless too. This feature takes a still image at a selectable 30 seconds, 1 minute, or every 5, 10, or 30 minutes – so it wouldn’t exactly qualify as a real time lapse feature to cinematographers. This mode strings the images together into a movie clip. This mode will be great for watching a worm crawl or making a claymation movie, but doesn’t work well for anything that moves faster than a sloth. Once the S2 is in the time lapse mode, it won’t respond to any other controls. The only way to snap the camera out of this mode is to turn it off and on again. Movies are easy to watch in the playback mode. Users have the same controls as a VCR available: fast forward, rewind, stop, play, and pause. However, there is no in-camera editing of movie clips.

Drive / Burst Mode (6.5)
This digital camera has a continuous and multi-shot burst options. The continuous mode shoots about 1.8 frames per second for 6 images before the buffer is filled. The multi-shot mode takes 16 pictures quite quickly and stacks them into one 4 x 4 tiled image file. It looks like an index print. There is also an interval time shooting mode that acts just like the one in movie mode, but it is composed of several still images instead of images strung together into a QuickTime file.

Playback Mode (7.0)
The playback mode can be accessed from any shooting mode by pressing the designated playback button. Pictures can be viewed individually, but when you scroll through them the image is fuzzy at first. After a half second or so, the image clears up – although it’s never completely smooth with the poor LCD resolution. Pictures can also be viewed in screens of four or sixteen, depending on how many times you press the wide end of the zoom mechanism. There is a slide show function available, but there are no cool options for fades or wipes or even for how long to play each picture. So for those of you who like the in-camera slide show creativity, keep looking; this isn’t your model. User can rewind, fast forward, pause, stop, and play movie in playback mode. There are no dividing and editing features, like some compact digital cameras have. The Playback menu consists of the following options: Setup, Print set, Slide show, Delete, Protect, Transfer marking, Small picture, and Copy.

Custom Image Presets (8.0)
The Nikon Coolpix S2 is built for the audience who will frequent the scene mode options. They are easy to access and easy to use. There are 15 scene modes in all: Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night Portrait, Party/ Indoor, Beach/ Snow, Sunset, Dusk/ Dawn, Night Landscape, Close up, Museum, Fireworks show, Copy, Backlight, and Panorama assist. The scene modes are laid out on a menu with an image mode option for changing the image size and a voice recording mode, which simply records audio. It does not take a picture with audio like many digital cameras can do. When the user finds anything confusing in the menu, the user can access the Help Guide with a touch of the telephoto end of the zoom mechanism (there is a question mark icon by it). The Help Guide explains each scene mode. For example, the Copy mode’s explanation is, "Take sharp pictures of printed text or whiteboard drawing." The Help Guide is a nice feature, as is the framing assists in some of the scene modes. The Portrait, Landscape, Night Portrait, and Sports modes all have selectable framing assists that appear in the form of yellowish translucent lines in elementary shapes. For the portrait, you frame the subject’s face in the circle and shoulders in the rounded rectangle. It’s a very simple setup, but it will help novice photographers compose their shots. The much-talked-about Face Priority AF must be selected in the portrait mode to work. The mode is supposed to automatically recognize faces and focus on them for clear portraits. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as I’d anticipated. The camera shows a red box around the face when it recognizes it, but it took quite a few seconds to find it. Sometimes the red box would appear on a shoulder or something other than a face. Faces must be shot straight on for this mode to work properly; it didn’t recognize profiles.