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| Click photo for more images of the Nikon Coolpix S7C. |
There are cameras built for performance, and then there are cameras built for fun. The Nikon Coolpix S7c ($280 street) definitely falls into the latter category. That's not to say it doesn't take a decent picture, but it's the bells and whistle that are the marketing features of this member of Nikon's Style line.
With a 7.1-megapixel sensor, a run of the mill internal focusing 3x zoom (35mm equivalent: 35-105 f/2.8-5.0), and a speckled gun metal grey body capped with silver accents, it's a good-looking slim digicam with a big 3-inch LCD. But the real selling point of this camera is the built-in WiFi and year's subscription to T-Mobile Hotspots, which together allow you to zap photos straight from the camera to your friend's e-mail address or favorite photo-sharing site.
Throw in some other cool features like stop-action and time-lapse movie modes and you've got a cool camera perfect for the young, mobile, Web 2.0 crowd.
Photo quality and performance are class competitive without setting the world on fire. As you'd expect, the S7c gets noisier as ISO increases, to the point where chromatic noise is very visible even on the LCD preview. This is typical of this camera class, but Nikon touts the eVR feature, or Electronic Vibration Reduction. Simply put, eVR is an ISO boost combined with aggressive in-camera image processing, which actually pumps the ISO into the noisier zone!
Nikon isn't alone with the "Digital Stabilization" hype; most camera manufacturers tout some variation on the theme. But in most cases, Digital Stabilization means nothing more than an ISO boost combined with wide aperture to speed up the shutter. So beware: noise increases as sensitivity increases, even if paired with a blur filter which reduces resolution by smoothing noise!
Surprisingly, the S7c doesn't offer a very robust in-camera editing package. Given the camera's ability to zap photos from the road with no computer attached, it would have been nice to see more than the simple in-camera options to resize or crop in on a photo. Cropping also reduces file size to two megapixels, by the way. This lack of in-camera options is a big oversight in a fun camera that can share photos from the corner coffee shop. Just think how much fun it would be to add photo frames, solarize, pencil sketch, and do other image tweaks before sharing.
On the capture side, there are a handful of shooting modes and styles that offer some creativity to snapshots: monochrome, sepia, cyanotype, and vivid colors to name a few. Also typical for this class of camera is the scene modes: fireworks, night portrait, beach, and so on, which pre-set the camera based on that shooting situation.
The camera itself feels solid and well-made, but the buttons, and, in particular, the scroll wheel, feel chintzy. This scroll wheel is how e-mail addresses are laboriously entered into the camera for sharing. There's no way to put it other than to say it simply feels cheaply made and cheaply attached. And the zoom lever, which sits atop the camera near the shutter button, is just a tiny lever that doesn't always feel like it's activated, even when it is.
But what about the WiFi? Does it really work? Can you really zap photos from Starbucks to your friend's computer? Well, kind of. When you activate the WiFi and you're in a WiFi zone, usually found at your neighborhood Starbucks, you input an e-mail address with the scroll wheel and a combination of buttons. Strangely, to confirm an address, it's not the OK button, but the shutter button! But then on the next step, OK sends the photos, and the shutter button does nothing. During e-mail input, meanwhile, OK changes the input from letters to symbols. It's a little confusing, probably more so for people over a certain age. Fortunately, the camera commits the e-mail addresses to memory, so it's not necessary to repeat that process to send new photos to the same people.
Now for the sort of part: the camera doesn't actually e-mail the photos to you or your friends. It e-mails a thumbnail and a link to the Nikon Coolpix Connect website, where the "photo print" sized images are posted. The photos are downsampled from 7.1 megapixels to a couple of smaller sizes, the largest of which -- 5.49 megabytes -- is compressed to about 250kb for sending as JPEGs. And don't think the Coolpix Connect website is your online archive. Download them as soon as possible, because after two weeks, they are gone!
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