Nikon Coolpix S6300 Digital Camera Review

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberration typically shows up as purple, red, or cyan fringing around objects, particularly in high-contrast situations (think dark leaves against a bright noonday sky). It's primarily a property dictated by the camera's lens, though sensor design can also come into play.

The Nikon S6300 displays significant and distracting chromatic aberration throughout its entire zoom and aperture range, even when there aren't high-contrast objects in view. As with sharpness, it's worst at the full 10x zoom setting, still bad at middle focal lengths, and best at full wide angle.

Distortion

Geometric distortion (the bending of straight lines) is fairly well controlled. Typically, you see barrel distortion at the wide end of zoom lenses, transitioning to pincushion toward the longer end of the focal range. With the S6300, pincushion distortion is in evidence throughout the entire zoom range, ranging from 0.61% at 4.5mm to 0.24% at 45mm. It's an extremely unusual result, leading us to suspect that the camera is doing significant in-camera correction.