Nikon COOLPIX S3100 Digital Cameras

i purchased a nikon camera and im very glad i did photos taken with this camera very good quality.

To put this in context, we purchased this camera as one of a handful of point-and-shoots; we bought a Nikon D90 shortly before having our first child, which is a stellar DSLR, to add to an old Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot that did take pretty good pictures, despite an excessively bright flash. After a couple of years, we wanted to 'downgrade' back to to point-and-shoot cameras, given that ours is about 5 years old, and newer ones are both more high-tech and relatively inexpensive for the given level of technology. We bought 'a few' to serve a couple of more or less specific roles, all shy of the DSLR's "big heavy super-high-quality photograph field cannon" role. The purpose of this one was to be... well, the cheap one. The everyday, easy-to-use, no-brainer, compact and lightweight and easy for my wife to put in the diaper bag and take to the museum or the park with the kids. Cheap enough that if you lost it or it got scratched by car keys, no big deal, nice enough to take good basic photos but otherwise no particularly fancy features. Now, put in that context, time for the inevitable 'pros' and 'cons'. Pros: - Extremely compact, lightweight, 'sexy' design with chrome details around silver metal body - Fast start-up, about 2.5 seconds to power up - Continuous shooting can get maybe a hair more than 1 picture per second. Specs list as 0.7s intervals. - Battery life seems to be good so far, about 200 pictures and several videos over the course of 3 days with all varieties of flash and zoom and the battery still indicates fully charged - Zoom is pretty powerful for such a compact camera Cons: - Skittish. It's hard to get a clear picture from the thing even with a steady hand. Image stabilization does nothing as far as I can tell. - Because of the former, producing sharp pictures with continuous shooting is pretty much hopeless - Focus is hopeless in ISO3200. No, with any automatic or manual setting, with or without the flash, focus is hopeless. About 1 out of every 4 pictures came out well-focused. Even focused pictures seem to have blurry points in the same range as other objects that are at the same distance, even near the center of the scene. This is even for things like city scenes in full daylight. - Abandon all hope, ye who shoot photos indoors... focus is abysmal. Did I already make this point? - Because the focus is so poor, zooming in on anything, even a little, is absolutely and totally hopeless. Taking pictures of animals at the museum came out occasionally reasonably focused; zooming in as little as 2x produced worthless blurry shot after worthless blurry shot - As with pretty much every point-and-shoot, the flash creates a scene completely washed out with white light - needs to be diffused. - Very slow to become responsive after a photo; with or without a photo review, the camera takes about 5s to become responsive and available for another photo. This appears to be the case with 3mp the same as 14mp. Just very, very, very slow. - Very slow to delete a picture; deleting a picture you don't like takes 3 clicks, then about 3 seconds to complete the operation. It's a little surprising how any device (phone, camera, gps, tablet, anything) could take that long to complete a simple operation... - The shutter speed is too slow or simply wrong; if you have kids, who are naturally always in motion, they'll be a blur even if they're standing still to pose for a photo. - Slow to actually fire a shot after zooming and pushing the button - sometimes 1 to 2 second delay, which means, the subject (kids!) is often simply gone by the time it actually shoots. - Grainy. Even in broad daylight, color fields on high-res pics, like buildings and peoples' faces, is grainy and pixellated with blotchy color tones. - Video. Can't record smoothly, even at lower resolution, with a high-quality Class 6 SDHC card. Don't bother with video. To be perfectly fair and objective, I took this camera and our Samsung ST-95 outside and took two shots per camera, of each of five subjects, in the same resolution, at the same time. I chose the sharper of the two photos from each camera and renamed the file generically. I then brought up the photos on our 1080p 55" TV - the largest-format, highest-resolution screen in the house. I showed them to my wife and asked her to choose "before" and "after", letting her know that I had swapped the order of the pictures randomly (so that A wasn't always the Nikon, B wasn't always the Samsung). In 5 out of 5 cases, she picked (and I agreed) the Samsung's pictures, simply on the focus. The Nikon just can't focus correctly. For example, on the back patio, the kids' tricycle is relatively focused, but the grill right beside it - both near the center of the shot - is entirely blurred out. All of my subjects were stationary out of necessity; I could not get a single clear picture of the kids or dogs with the Nikon, so there was no relevant comparison to be made. Using "scenes" to balance the settings made absolutely no difference on focus, only color balance. Overall, this camera is a fine solution if you don't expect much and you won't do much with it. You could shoot some video or take pictures of inert objects at medium range in full daylight and maybe one out of every two or three photos will be focused enough to pass a cursory inspection (don't look too close), but beyond that I'm afraid this camera just can't perform acceptably. It'll capture images, but they won't be GOOD. Despite the aforementioned purpose for which we bought this camera, we'll probably take around one of the better / other ones instead. It's really just about as well not to take a picture of those 'precious moments', as to attempt to do so with this camera. Other folks who have claimed that they are satisfied with this camera just can't be looking very closely at their pictures; after three outings and a few hundred pictures I am just amazed at how poor the quality of the shots are, in every environment, every light, every kind of subject. It's not for lack of use or lack of knowledge/experience with digital cameras; this really just has an extremely poor-quality sensor and processor and, I would assume, sub-standard firmware. I suggest looking at other entry-level offerings such as Samsung ST-65. Or, go for a mid-range camera. You really should only consider this camera if the looks of the camera itself matter a whole lot more than the quality of the pictures it can take - and, if the quality of the pictures it takes don't matter much at all to you. If you do care about the ability to capture images, this camera will not be satisfactory. I do not recommend this camera.

This camera pretty much rocks for its price. I bought this camera because I was in need of a camera update and the cell phone camera on my G2 wasn't cutting it. When I took this think out of the box for the first time I was glad to notice that it's small and thin and fits nicely in my pocket. My old camera was much bulkier and I couldn't carry it in my pocket without a strange looking bulge in my pants that made me look like an idiot. I am not a digital photographer so I bought this camera as more of a point-and-shoot camera. I wanted a camera that I could snap a quick picture that would have lots of details and look pretty nice without too much photo editing. Normally when I take a picture I am wanting a picture of my friends or myself at a certain event or next to a landmark etc... So I wanted a camera that would be simple but still take a sweet picture. I can't tell you how many times I've had people trying to snap a picture for me only to not be able to get my old camera to work right and the picture(s) turn out horribly. Like I want to load a fuzzy blur up onto my Facebook page. That being said, this camera can also cause difficulties with the technologically retarded. This camera has to achieve a "focus" before it will snap a picture. Sometimes you can push down the button trying to take a picture and the "focus" will be off and it won't even snap a photo at all. For those special individuals, who for some reason are always snapping my photos, this can cause extreme problems with their abilities to be able get the camera to function. Now you may be asking yourself why I would have rated the camera so high and said that it rocks and then ripping it a new one, but I just wanted to let you know the only problem that I have had with it so far. This camera perhaps is not the easiest camera to use, but if you spend 5 minutes to learn how it works then you will be able to get excellent pictures from it. The camera's picture taking mode basically has 4 different options, Auto mode, Scene mode, Smart portrait, and Subject tracking. In my experience so far with this camera I have noticed that the Auto-mode isn't always perfect. I may have to take a bunch of pictures, before I can get the picture looking like I want it to look. To be honest I am a bit picky with my pictures though. Many times when I am having somebody else snap a picture for me that can be quite an annoyance. The Auto-mode definitely works better on landscapes than it does for people (in my opinion). The scene-selector mode is sweet when I am the one taking the picture there are 15+ differing options that optimize the camera for different types of pictures such as: sunset, portrait, pet, beach, party/indoor, etc. I gave up even trying to teach the technologically handicapped this mode after the 2nd attempt. The mode that has been the most useful for me has been the Smart-portrait mode. This mode basically finds a couple of people's faces and then focuses the picture on them. Since the majority of the time I am taking pictures of people I have found this to be an amazing option. I use this mode for 90% of my pictures. I get pictures that look amazing and I usually give the camera to other people in this mode although sometimes it won't take a picture and they will have to "refocus" the camera by re-pressing the button. The smart tracking picture mode has honestly not been something that I have needed yet but I suppose it takes pictures of moving objects or something like that. I could ramble on more but I figure that this should be sufficient for now. Overall this camera takes great pictures, they look sweet in print and they are very photoshopable (is that actually a word?) and look great in print form and also on the web.

I LOVEEEEEEEEE the camera, but the lens broke the second day.

I needed something small and easy that I could use on days that I couldn't haul around my big DSLR as I had recently broken my older Point & Shoot. So when I saw this on sale for less than $100 I went for it. For the price I paid, it's probably okay but I give it 2 stars because I wouldn't recommend this to a friend and given the chance again, I wouldn't buy another one. Assuming that you're in the right light already, and that your subject isn't moving much, the pictures this takes are great. Outside of these conditions, this camera is pretty useless. The image stabilization on this is pretty much non-existent and it's horrible with lighting. It's terrible at correcting the white balance for indoor lighting and it picks up yellowish light where there isn't any. The flash is horrible too. Its too bright and has a tendency to completely wash everything out and there's always red-eye. Plus if you leave it on auto, the flash will pretty much always go off. It takes good pictures in the daytime and in natural light but beyond that not so much. Focusing is also very minimal. If your subject moves at all while taking the picture, it doesn't adjust the focus resulting in fuzzy pics. So now I have a bunch of pictures where I made my nephew stop and pose so I could get a clean shot of him, and his face is focused but his hands are all a blur since he is a bit fidgety with his fingers. It's okay as a backup and I don't mind letting the kids play with it but I miss my old powershot. Also, it bugs me that I have to plug the whole camera in to charge the battery. What's the point of a removable battery if it doesn't have it's own charger? I hate leaving my cameras out where they could be knocked off the table by the dog and then subsequently stepped on by the kid chasing the dog. I prefer it when I only have to risk the battery by leaving it out to charge but maybe I should be glad for it this time because then I'd have an excuse to replace it. I wouldn't rely on this camera to take care of all the important moments in life but if you're looking for something purse-sized for non-essential events this will work. I wasn't expecting it to take pics as great as my DSLR but my old P&S from 4 years ago would still have outperformed this one. For the price, this would be good for a child or someone who only very seldom takes pictures but if you're going to buy this as your main camera I would skip it. Shell out an extra $40-50 for a better model.

Well This is now my Third Nikon Digital Camera I have a D3100 and I had a S3000 COOLPIX which I lost at work. And now the S3100 which is an upgraded S3000 Which I liked very well but this one is even better it's yet to be seen how well it does as compared to my other digital cameras I really really like the size and weight of this camera it really surprised me when I first saw the s3000 and this one is the same size it's really small it's smaller than my cell phone and about the same width and weighs about the same so it's very easy to carry around in you shirt pocket. This model has a video button for quick access right on the back of the camera about the same place as my D3100's video lever is, quick and easy to use I opted of this model over the S4100 which has the touch screen. very easy to use and the Nikon ViewNX2 software which I already had on my computers is great with the Nikon transfer which I set to come up when I plug the Camera into the USB port and it's very fast I am using a 16G SD card and it works great this is what I use on my D3100 DLSR and I have about 3000 pictures on it and it's only about 1/4 full I take a lot of pictures of Graveyards for FindAGrave.com and this little camera is my almost constant companion I use it at work a lot and it's my backup and a quick cam to use at Church also very small. I had ordered a Panasonic Model about a week ago to replace my lost Nikon because the reviews were great and it was a top seller on Amazon, but when I got it and for some reason I really hadn't checked it's size and I said this is a mistake I picked the wrong camera this one is way bigger than the Nikon but in it's defense it did have a 16x Lens But I boxed it right back up and sent it back. Then ordered this Nikon S3100 Three Days Ago fast shipping indeed!