Nikon S520

The Nikon S520 won’t win any competitions for offering the most features, being the smallest and lightest, or having a bargain price tag, but it does offer a compelling mix of simplicity, attractive looks and most importantly good image quality.

The headline-grabbing specification is the inclusion of Optical VR Image Stabilization. Unlike a lot of the S520’s competitors, which offer a sub-standard electronic stabilisation system that simply increases the ISO speed, Nikon have fitted a true mechanical system to help minimize the effect of camera shake. More experienced photographers may think that having image stabilisation on a camera with a 3x zoom lens is overkill, but beginners will appreciate the noticeably sharper images that they can achieve when hand-holding this camera.

The combination of optical VR with a fastest ISO speed of 2000 also means that you can take sharper shots in low-light situations without having to resort to using flash. This is a real boon for places like museums, where flash is usually not allowed, or if you just want a more natural result than using flash produces. We don’t recommend that you use any speed above ISO 800 too often though, as the results are very noisy, but it’s nice to know that the option is there should you need it.

The S520’s low-light capabilities are further increased by the relatively fast lens. Although the 3x lens isn’t particularly wide at 35mm or long at 105mm, it does offer respectably fast maximum apertures of f/2.8 at wide-angle and f/4.7 at telephoto, helping to capture plenty of light. We found the 3x zoom lens delivered sharp results, except right in the corners of the frame at the 35mm focal length, where detail took on a smeared look.

This is a good looking and very well-built compact camera that your friends will envy. The front is finished with a stylish brushed-steel effect, whilst the rest of the aluminium body has a more subdued but still good-looking anodised effect. Everything exudes quality, with excellent attention to detail lending the S520 a certain bombproof quality. The only fly in the ointment from a design perspective is the poorly positioned, plastic tripod mount, but that’s a minor quibble for a camera that may never make it onto a tripod.

The S520 has a merely adequate LCD screen, which is only 2.5 inches in size and has a disappointingly low number of pixels, resulting in a slightly grainy appearance. We also found that images were much brighter onscreen at the default setting that they actually were when viewed on a computer, so much so that highlights often appeared washed out. It’s therefore a good idea to turn the screen brightness down a notch or two to compensate. On the plus side the LCD screen does have an anti-reflective coating to help enhance visibility in bright sunlight.

The Coolpix S520 doesn’t offer newer innovations such as smile or blink detection, but there are a trio of core technologies designed to make your pictures better. Face-priority AF automatically detects, focuses and exposes on faces, making sure that your family members and friends are the most prominent part of the picture. D-Lighting rescues dark or backlit images by selectively improving brightness and detail where required. Finally In-camera Red-eye Fix automatically fixes most instances of red-eye in the camera, a great feature if you take lots of indoor photos using flash.

This isn’t the most feature-rich camera around, but Nikon have included a couple of nice touches to help customise the camera to your taste. The Favourite Scenes setting allows you to save your three favourite Scene modes for quick and easy access, which are then accessed via the new Favourites button above the D-pad. A small touch but one which avoids having to scroll through all the scene modes to find the one you want. With Favourite Pictures you can create your own in-camera photo album categories and add pictures to them simply by pressing the Set button during image playback.

The S520 has an 8 megapixel sensor, which doesn’t make it very competitive in the megapixel wars, but is a sensible choice for a small-sensor camera. Unless you’re making huge prints from your images or you want to do some serious cropping, 8 megapixels provides a good balance between size and quality. This is borne out by looking closely at a photo from the S520 at 100% magnification on a computer screen. There are very few of the unwanted artifacts and chromatic aberrations that cameras with higher megapixel counts typically suffer from. The images from this camera might be physically smaller, but they are of much higher quality as a consequence. Noise doesn’t really make its presence felt until ISO 800, and the sharp and fast lens means that you won’t have to do too much post-processing in Photoshop. The camera usually got the exposure right first time, only being fooled by the usual problem situations of strong backlighting or deep shadows, and dynamic range was also commendable, with the excellent D-lighting feature available to rescue any underexposed areas. Overall the Coolpix S520 makes a very strong case for choosing a camera with a sensible amount of resolution, rather than buying the one with the headline-grabbing high numbers.