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Nikon Coolpix S710 First Digital Camera Impressions Review

First Impressions Review

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Design / Layout
October 02, 2008 By Richard Baguley
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Viewfinder
There is no viewfinder on the S710; all of the image previews and photo composition are handled on the monitor.
LCD Screen
For the size of the camera, the 3-inch screen is pretty big, and it takes up most of the back of the camera. The screen looked reasonably clear and bright in our informal tests at the Photokina show, and we found the on-screen image preview to be pretty good; we didn't notice a lot of jerky or jittery video as we panned around. The screen is not particularly sharp, though; it has just 230,000 pixels and many cameras have higher resolutions, such as the Samsung TL34HD, which has 460,000 pixels. However, the Nikon S710 screen is adequate for general use, as you can see fine details on photos to make sure that they are in focus.

The 3-inch LCD screen dominates the back  of the S710,
but it is not overly sharp


Flash
The flash is very small and thin, and located quite close to the lens, which might exacerbate the red-eye in photos. We weren't able to test this at the Photokina show, though. Nikon claims a flash range of 1 foot, 8 inches to 27 feet at the wide-angle setting. This sounds somewhat optimistic, but we will have to wait until our full review is complete before we can discuss this in more detail.


The long, thin flash is located close to the lens.


Lens
The lens is a 3.6x zoom model made by Nikon themselves. It has a focal length of 6 - 21.6 mm, which works out the equivalent of a 28 -101mm lens on a 35mm camera. That's a decent range for a compact camera, and we like the way it starts at the relatively wide setting of 28mm. Most compacts offer longer zooms at the cost of a smaller angle of view, but a bigger zoom won't help when you can't get your family into a group shot because the wide angle is not wide enough.


The lens is a homegrown 3.6x zoom model

Connections
The S710 only has a single connection to the outside world; a port under a plastic cover on the base of the camera accepts both the USB and A/V connection. Cables for both are supplied with the camera, but make sure you don't lose proprietary wires, since they'll be hard-to-find and expensive to replace. There is no power connection for using an external AC adapter or charging the battery.



This single port does double duty as the USB and A/V out port.
Battery
The S710 is powered by a small 1080mAh battery that fits into the battery cavity on the base of the device. Nikon claims a battery life of 250 shots for this battery, but we were unable to test this at the Photokina show. One thing to note is that the battery cannot be charged inside the camera itself; it has to be removed and then charged in the included battery charger.

 
The battery slides into the battery cavity,
alongside the media card.
Memory
The S710 has around 42MB of internal memory, but the primary image storage is an SD card, which slides neatly into the slot just underneath the battery.

Other Features
Image Stabilization – The S710 includes optical image stabilization, where an element of the lens moves to compensate for camera shake. Nikon refers to this feature as VR (or Vibration Reduction), but the principle is the same as that used by other manufacturers. We were unable to test the efficacy of this feature at the Photokina show. 

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Nikon Coolpix S710 First Digital Camera Impressions Review
First Impressions Review
0 Comments
(add your own)

Previous: Page 1

Physical Tour

Previous: Page 3

Design / Layout