Nikon Coolpix S230

Manual Controls

The Nikon S230 is a simple camera and doesn't have any true manual modes like aperture/shutter priority or full manual. You can make some manual adjustments to things like ISO, but don't expect a lot of control here. You're really at the mercy of the S230's automatic mode for the most part.

Focus

Like most modern cameras the Nikon S230 offers a face detection mode that will focus on faces in the scene. It also takes advantage of the touch screen allowing you to tap on any point on your screen to lock focus on that point. You can exit this mode by pressing the Off button that appears just over the Menu button at the bottom left of the screen once you've tapped on the screen. Although an interesting feature you do have to be careful not to accidentally tap the screen and lock your focus on accident. There is no support for manual focus.

You can lock focus by tapping on the screen.

ISO

The Nikon S230 offers a fairly typical range of ISO options that can be accessed via the main menu. ISO settings go all the way up to ISO 2000, although frankly we wouldn't recommend using anything above 400 with a camera this limited.

ISO ranges from 80 to 2000.

White Balance

The Nikon S230 offers a standard selection of white balance modes. You can choose from Auto, Daylight, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Cloudy and Flash. There's also a manual white balance option, a nice feature to see on a simple point and shoot like the S230.

You'll have to go into the menu to switch white balance.

Metering

The Nikon S230 doesn't offer any metering modes that you can select from. We think it likely that it uses either average or center-weighted metering as its default.

Shutter Speed

Nikon has not published any information about the range of shutter speeds the Nikon S230 offers, this isn't too important since you have no control over that anyways.

Aperture

The Nikon S230's aperture range is nothing overly impressive, starting at f/3.1 at the wide end and going down to a maximum aperture of f/5.9 at the tele end. Frankly even with the camera zoomed all the way out you're not going to get very impressive low-light performance out of S230, so we recommend you use the flash when in dim conditions.

Image Stabilization

Nikon is making a big deal about the Nikon S230's image stabilization features, with four different features that are supposed to help you get sharp photos. The first is software processing to produce sharper images. The second is motion detection that boosts the ISO and shutter speed automatically when a moving object is detected. They also tout the ISO 2000 capabilities of the S230 and a Best Shot Selector feature that takes up to 10 photos and saves the sharpest.

Frankly none of these features wow us. Yes, they can help in some situations, but they're not going to perform as well as optical image stabilization or sensor shift. Not that we're surprised to see the lack of these features on a camera as small as the S230.

Picture Quality & Size Options

The Nikon S230 offers two quality options for images: High and Normal. The maximum image size is 3648 x 2736 with the smallest coming in at 640 x 480 and three options in between. You can also choose a 16:9 setting at a resolution of 3584 x 2016.

Picture Effects

There are no picture effects like Sepia or Black and White available on the Nikon S230.