Nikon - S600 Digital Camera Review

Seems like I'm always buying a new camera before taking a trip...the Nikon S600 purchase was no exception.  Not having sufficient time to do research, I went to my local BestBuy and compared this camera to it's smaller 500 series brother.  I was concerned that the S600 was about to be discontinued because it was already marked down, but the salesman assured me that both camera came out at the same time.  I opted for the slightly more expensive S600 and went home to charge the battery and to pack for my trip to Belgium and the Czech Republic. Nikon promoted the S600 as having "the fastest start-up time for any camera in its class."  While that is true, I wrongly assumed it would be ready to shoot a picture after starting up so quickly.  My bad...

My initial impression looking at it's sleek lines and compact design was positive.  I've owned several Nikon Coolpix point and shoot cameras and have never been pleased with the way they looked...until now.  I arrived in Brussles, checked into my hotel and shot my first pictures on the S600.  The first 10 minutes of using the camera were disappointing, to say the least.  I was impressed with the near instant camera start up after pushing the power button, but despite instantly displaying a picture on the large, easy to see LCD screen, pressing the shutter button down did nothing until a couple of seconds later.  I also found out in the same 10 minutes that it was impossible to shoot continuous pictures because of an unusually long lag time (sometimes several seconds) between shots.  My gut reaction was defective camera and slow memory, respectively.  A quick trip to the European counterpart of a BestBuy proved otherwise.  With memory being relatively cheap, I shoot many pictures; this day in Brussles was no exception.  Unfortunately, the third disappointment in the S600 crept up after lunch when the low battery indicator sent me back to electronics store to purchase a second battery.  Fortunately the European "mega electronics" store is better stocked than BestBuy because I was able to purchase the battery off the shelf in Europe; I've not seen the battery in stock outside of a brick and mortar camera store in the US.  Needless to say, having two dead batteries forced me to use my backup camera - an older Sony DSC-F828.

I returned to my hotel room a little disgruntled at the thought of having to charge two batteries to accommodate a days worth of shooting and the thought of spending another day "waiting" on the S600 to allow me to take pictures.  My mood dramatically changed when I loaded the day's pictures into Photoshop CS3; the pictures from the Nikon S600 were excellent!  I could clearly see which pictures were shot on the Nikon S600 from the ones shot on the backup camera.  The optical VR and descent high ISO performance allowed me to shoot some nice pictures of the interior of a few Churches without the flash.  I shot several low light photos to test the various ISO levels supported by the S600 and found excellent performance up to 800, good performance at 1600 and very acceptable performance at 3200.  I went to bed that evening looking forward to another day's shooting thinking of the picture quality instead of looking back at the disappointments in the mechanics encountered in using the S600.