Nikon Coolpix S600 10MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Optical Zoom with Vibration Reduction (Slate Black)

I have been using this camera for over 6 months now, and it takes fantastic photos. The automatic options for various "Scenes" (Landscape, Museum, etc.) do a great job of automatically changing the settings depending on your situation. Once you master those options, you'll end up with some awesome shots. My friends can't believe that some of the pics I've shared with them were taken with a point and shoot digital cam.

This camera is also super-sensitive in low-light situations, which is handy for taking night shots, candlelit scenes, etc. The colors are nicely saturated without being overblown, and the white balance is pretty good right out of the box.

It's small, light and compact, too, so it doesn't take up much room and weighs almost nothing. Still, it feels quite sturdy and the components feel like they are of good quality.

Hello, I'm a student from Germany and I'm totally satisfied with this product.
What seperates this camera from similar ones is the lower focal length of 28mm which allows me to take good pictures in close surroundings.
It absolutely makes sense to spend a little more money for this feature!
AWESOME!!!

The camera arrived the day it was promised. The camera was purchased as a birthday gift for my daughter. She was extremely happy with it. The pictures quality is excellent and I saved over $80.00 purchasing it from Amazon.com instead of purchasing it from my local camera shop. Ray Dawson

I bought this camera for my deployment to Iraq. i absolutely love it. the ONLY complaints i have about it are that it only takes videos for 10min at a time and that if you dont have flash on that sometimes the pictures can be really grainy. but that is easily fixable... flash lol

Have been very pleased with this camera; it's very ease to use, basically point and shoot. Light weight so it's easy to always have with you.

The image quality is not as good as I expect. However, I am not buying a $300 or more point & shoot camera.

Before this camera I always used Canon and get very used to Canon's applications and style. This time I wanted to try new thing and everybody suggested Nikon. This one little bit slower than Canon SD 850 but it has perfect color control with flash where Canon doesnt have! It very small and easy to use. I like it but if I need to buy again I will prefer Canon instead.

I bought this camera because I travel a lot, mostly to sporting events. This camera is perfect for me because of it's size. I can just put in my pocket and not have to worry. The day after I bought it I went to a NASCAR event and snapped over 200 pics. All came out perfectly. My wife likes it because she can carry it with her and have it handy to take pics of our 1 year old. I highly recommend this camera to someone who can appreciate the covenience and quality.

I read the reviews for both S600 & S700 and chose 600 over 700 as that had better reviews and it's true. The main reason I got it was for its 4x Wide angle zoom and its at night capability. It's an excellent camera if you want to upgrade your existing digital camera for a reasonable price.

My wife wanted a small (actually very small) camera she can put in her pursue. After a brief research i felt this Nikon will do the job. And it does. To the point I want to use it even more then my own trustee Canon. It's great for people who are not into fidling with every shot but would like to get great picture nevertheless. Then this camera is for you.

Camera is light, easy to handle, simple to operate, picture quality is excellent. Big drawback is shutter lag which is really annoying.

it is very smart,and I can easily hold it in my pocket. I like it small camera, it makes photographing pretty enjoyable and convernient.

I chose this camera as I wanted a camera that could take good quality shots, was fast to start up, easy to use and small enough to carry around easily.
I think this camera is all of those things. I travel alot and find this nikon great for carrying around in a pocket / bag without taking up any real space.
I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 for two reasons.

1)It doesn't take AA batteries. My last camera did and I found that very useful when it ran out of juice in a foreign country or if I simply didn't have the charger with me. Simple solution though... buy a second battery, which I did relatively cheaply on Amazon.

2) I had the camera only a week or two when during a family wedding the camera had a bit of a melt down. I know these family things can be stressfull but ....
Basically every picture had dark black lines horizontally across the screen for a while and then after a few more photos the colour went funny and it wouldn't even focus.
In saying that, Amazon exchanged it immediately with no questions asked and the new one works fine.

In all, it's a good little camera, I love the "brushed steel" kind of look and I would recommend it with three suggestions.
1) buy a spare battery
2) buy a zip up bag for it (the screen scratches easily)
3) stay clear of family weddings

This handy little pocket camera is wonderful. I compared the pix from this camera with my Nikon D80 with a 28-300 lens. The pix were comparable. Of course, the S600 isn't as fast, but for the money it is a fabulous little camera. I ALWAYS have it in my pocket. Never know when you need a camera. It has the ability - in camera - to zoom in on a pix you have taken and then with the press of a button to crop and save the pix that you have enlarged. So you have both the original pix and the enlarged/cropped pix. Great feature. My only complaint is a small one. I would like it to be easier via the menu to format my memory card. But a small nuisance for an otherwise wonderful product. The screen is fairly viewable in bright light. This can be a problem with many cameras. But when I first looked at this camera, I asked the salesman to come outside with me so I could look at the screen in light. None of them are perfect, but this one was okay. I miss a viewfinder, but very few of the pocket cameras have this. Overall I am thrilled with this little beauty.

Just returned from a second vacation and had the opportunity to test the Scene mode in a variety of situations. Works great, especially the back light and the museum modes. Flash and red eye work great at providing wonderful natural colors. Compact size works great for slipping camera into pocket and taking on the go.

There are so many things that I like about this camera:
-small size. I didn't realize that it's smaller than the Sony W series of which I have owned a few. The Sony's are great, but the NIkon S600 is better if you want the smallest form factor with the best image quality. I also owned the Sony T200 and now I realized that Sony calling it ultra-slim is quite a joke since it really is bigger than the Nikon S cameras.
-Great image quality. I love the quality of the photos this little camera takes. I love vivid colors and I use the vivid settings all the time, and it gives me the right amount of color saturation and contrast to make my pics pop! The sharpness is also excellent.
-Great lens. The wide angle lens in this camera has excellent sharpness, consistently sharp from edge to edge, something you would expect from Nikon.
-Fast startup and autofocus times. I think this is as good as most other cameras, if not better.

There are some minor annoyances. The video, while quite excellent, loses sound a second before the video ends. This was true of the Nikon S510 which I formerly owned. I was hoping Nikon would have fixed it by now. I also wished you can go from viewing images to taking photos by half-pressing the shutter button like in other cameras like Sony and Canon, but no such luck. You have to press the play button to go from view mode to shooting mode.

While other brands give you more options for image parameters especially in the canons, bottom line for me is the excellent image quality and fast startup and autofocus performance of this camera. If you want the smallest form factor with the best image quality, then the Nikon Coolpix S600 is it!

This camera offers great bang for the buck. The shots you can take with it are absolutely fine - my wife is a pro photographer and loves this thing. You can carry it anywhere, take great photos, and then print them up nice and big without losing any quality.

If you are in the market for a relatively inexpensive point and shoot you should definitely add this camera to you list. I highly doubt you will be disappointed.

MADE IN CHINA! Fast start up, but SLOW shutter. Small size, very pocketable. I have a Canon 790 IS, 3 inch lcd, out performs this S600 by leaps in all respects, and is made in Japan. Also, the S600 battery charger is cheapo corded unit, most up to date chargers are directly pluggable to hang on an outlet.
UPDATE: 8/19/08: No problems, battery life is reasonable. Really like the way the S600 crops, best yet! Simply select pic, zoom to larger size, select area to crop, press select button. VOILA! It re-records. This is one of the reasons that a high mega pixel camera is at an advantage. Wish that AMZ would stock the EN-EL10 battery as a "free ship" item, "Sellers" want S&H that is a 'lil steep. So far no regrets on buying this camera, would reccomend it as a nice P&S for the price on AMZ.

Fairly good product for the price.

Pros: Super fast start up. Intuitive interface. Beautiful outlook.

Cons: not so good auto white balance (but manual works well). Noisy at high ISO (but 200 is fairly good).

Bottom line: nice point-and-shoot small, handy camera. Recommended for shooting daily family photos.

Got this camera for the wide angle lens, Nikon name and small size only to be sorely disappointed. The pictures are great, don't get me wrong, and I agree with the other reviews. However, as you can see there are one or two people who rate this camera very negatively. They are right, and I suspect that others who would rank this Nikon very low are just not bothering to write. If your fingers are just the right size I bet you'd find the scroll wheel very handy to navigate all the features. I just find it a clumsy solution to what Panasonic has done so much better. It's difficult to switch modes as you have to use the wheel to identify on the display screen if you want portrait, bright sunlight, no flash etc. You might say that the camera takes care of most of these functions automatically and to a degree you'd be right. Except of course for those situations that you would need this otherwise fast start up camera to listen quickly to what you would want it to do! And here's the other thing: shutter lag. For its extremely fast startup, the S600 is just painfully slow in between shots, something I thought I could live with but that in practice is annoying to say the least. My last gripe is about the battery. If I don't use a camera for a few days I don't expect the battery to drain by itself. That's right, I have taken perhaps 15 pictures, most in broad daylight, then didn't use the camera for about 5 days and the battery was dead, empty, non-responsive. After a recharge the camera came back to life but how do you like that? Back to Panasonic for the wide angle lens. Nikon, shame on you.

I have no idea why this camera got so many bad reviews. I find it to be a great camera with awesome features and ease of operation. Pictures are crisp and lusterous in color.

Very fast camera. I've taken several pics in low light environments without the use of the flash and have excellent quality images. Also the VR feature has saved many shots taken from a moving vehicle. I would recommend this camera to anyone looking for a point & shoot camera.Nikon Coolpix S600 10MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Optical Zoom with Vibration Reduction (Slate Black)