Nikon Coolpix S620

At the other end of the scale from the L19, the S620 is one of Nikon's fully loaded high-end compacts. It isn't as petite as the more expensive Canons, though, and while it's narrower and shorter than the Coolpix S220, it's also a fair amount thicker at 24mm.

As with the S220, it doesn't have quite the heft of some of the other high-end competition either: the casing feels thinner, but not to the point of frailty. And the features list is dripping with all current mod cons, including 12.2 megapixels, optical image stabilisation, an ultra-high ISO 6400 mode, 4x zoom and 28mm wide-angle setting. The 2.7in screen fills most of the back of the camera, and the S620 starts up astonishingly fast too: the lens rockets out of the body in around half a second.

Unfortunately, the rear controls are small, fiddly and, worse still, feel flimsy. Passing it around with the Canon Ixus 100 IS, most people preferred the Canon.

Image quality in outdoor shots was disappointing, with the cheaper Coolpix S220 giving noticeably sharper results with better detail. In particular, the lens of the S620 was very soft at full wide-angle, blurring the smaller twigs and branches in trees into a bit of an indistinct mess.

Low-light performance was very good, with impressively low levels of noise at ISO 1600 making it one of the few cameras in this test we'd really consider practical at high ISO. For everyday use, though, the S620 misses the mark.

Author: David Fearon