Nikon Coolpix S6: Attack of the white thingies!

A while back I got my hands on a Nikon Coolpix S6. As far as looks go, this one is a stunner; amazingly sleek, sexy and with a clear, bright, large LCD display. A classmate even mistook it for a bulky cellphone-cam instead of an ultra-sleek camera!

As far as I could find, reviewers are going ga-ga over this sweet ‘lil camera. But my experience was anything but sweet. When the natural lighting is good, so are the images. But come indoors and its another story altogether. Poorly lit images with weird artifacts that look like there are water droplets on the camera lens (no there were none). Just jump over to Amazon.com’s user reviews for Coolpix S5 and you’ll see this effect being referred to by all sorts of names; blob, comet, halo et al … [EDIT] And Nikon customer support does not bother to reply to emails highlighting this issue.

Night shots are worse; barely worth keeping.

Redeye galore: Another major issue I faced; when there were no blobs, there were the redeyes to spoil the party. The camera did send out multiple flashes (I think they’re for the purpose of reducing subject’s pupil size to reduce red-eye, not sure though) but there was redeye in almost every photograph. Thank goodness Picasa took care of most of them and made the end-result almost satisfactory. I wonder if that was some option I missed out There is no user-customizable option for redeye reduction; never felt don’t feel like using the camera again.

I really wonder, if S6 is good only for well-lit outdoors then I might as well stick with my Nokia 6681 phone-cam which is not too bad in such setting either.

Them White Things 😕

(Click on the thumbnails for bigger images)