Nikon COOLPIX S8000 review

Nikon enters the pocket travel-zoom market

The COOLPIX S8000 is Nikon’s first attempt at a travel-zoom compact, combining a 10x optical zoom lens with a slim and stylish body that can easily be slipped inside a trouser or jacket pocket.

The S8000 looks like any other run-of-the-mill compact, but the ability to zoom from 30mm to 300mm in a couple of seconds opens up a whole new world of photographic possibilities. Virtually any subject can be reached by the S8000’s lens, with only close-up nature shots and ultra-wide-angle landscapes outside its remit.

In addition to being the slimmest 10x zoom camera on the market, the S8000 is also one of the quickest, with almost instant start up, no discernible shutter lag and fast autofocusing that outshines most competitors. Nikon describes the AF system as ‘DSLR-like’, and it’s almost right, with just a 0.2-sec delay before the S8000 locks onto the subject, even in poor lighting and at both ends of the zoom range.

There is one big fly in the ointment, though, namely an inexplicable three-second lockup after the camera is switched on, during which you can’t operate any of the camera’s controls or, more importantly, take a photo. The S8000’s LCD screen may burst into life immediately, but the rest of the camera is slow to follow, resulting in missed opportunities. It’s best to just leave the S8000 permanently switched on during use, although this inevitably reduces the already distinctly average battery life of 200 shots.

Burst shooting is also something of a major disappointment, with the headline-grabbing 3fps continuous shooting rate only being achieved because the resolution drops to three megapixels. The frame rate at full ten-megapixel resolution is a rather more pedestrian 1fps, much less than the advertised figure and not fast enough to keep up with the action.

As with most recent digital compacts, the S8000 can shoot high-definition video at 1280 x 720 pixels at 30fps, complete with stereo sound and a HDMI port to connect the camera to your HDTV. Again there is a major oversight on Nikon’s part with the Movie mode – you can’t use the optical zoom during recording, only the 2x digital one, which instantly makes the S8000 much less attractive as a serious alternative to a camcorder. A lack of premium video features like wind cut, optical image stabilisation

and in-camera editing means that the S8000’s video capabilities ultimately fall short

of expectations.

The three-inch LCD screen on the rear of the camera is much more appealing, offering a very high resolution of 921k dots. This results in a detailed and vibrant display, which puts standard LCD screens to shame. Your images really come alive on the S8000’s excellent display and it’s also easier to judge manual focusing, although still a little awkward to achieve consistently sharp images.

The S8000 boasts a 14-megapixel sensor, the highest resolution offered by the current crop of compact cameras. This is a lot of pixels to squeeze onto the comparatively tiny sensor, and unfortunately it shows in the S8000’s images. Noise becomes all too apparent at ISO 800 and the faster settings of 1600 and 3200 prove far too noisy for everyday use. Chromatic aberrations in the form of purple fringing rear their head in

high-contrast lighting, and the images are soft out of the camera with no option to increase the sharpening level. The 1cm Macro mode is undeniably useful, though, as is the excellent vibration reduction system which helps to avoid camera shake.

The Nikon COOLPIX S8000 gets a lot of things right, notably the slim body, excellent lens and responsive operation. Ultimately, however, it gets too many of its key features wrong, with start-up delay, slow Burst mode, inability to zoom during video recording and merely average image quality. All of these flaws collectively detract from what is otherwise a very good entry into the competitive travel-zoom arena.