Labs

With its brushed aluminium body and 120g weight, Nikon's S550 is a smart little camera, if lacking in design flair. The highlight feature is its 5x zoom lens, but half the cameras here match or better this, and all have optical image stabilisation. A sticker on the camera includes the letters VR, short for vibration reduction, but this refers to the S550's ability to process saved images to remove camera shake. Doing so increased perceived

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sharpness a little and noise by a vast amount, but it was only available for photos that were reasonably sharp already.

Smile detection is a daft feature, but lots of fun. We like how the camera shoots automatically when it spots a grin, but also lets you step in to shoot manually. It's great to see a true spot focus option; most so-called spot focus modes are just centre focus. Sadly, centre and spot metering are both lacking. While some cameras can focus in half a second, the S550 takes this long to start focusing, and up to two seconds to lock on to its subject. This largely explains the disappointing 3.6-second gap between photos. The 0.9fps continuous mode is just as disappointing and lasts for only six shots.

As with most of the 10-megapixel cameras here, the S550 produced detailed photos in bright conditions but images were noisy in low light. Even the preview image became indistinct. Image quality was about average in this group, and the S550 doesn't do anything else to make it stand out.