A cool little square camera that's sure to disappoint.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lightweight, fits easily into pocket, very cool looking.

Cons: Very limited creative controls, mediocre picture quality, short battery life and WAY TOO EXPENSIVE

The Bottom Line: 
For the price Nikon is asking for, you are 100 times better off getting similarly priced (or cheaper) models such as Canon S45 or Nikon's own 2500, 3500 and 3100

Author's Review
Nikon CoolPix SQ – SQ for square
I have just returned from a field day with the Nikon CoolPix SQ (3.1 megapixel) and I am ready to give an honest review of this little square camera.

First, I’d like to say that I choose not to re-list camera or hardware specifications as this is redundant since this information can be accessed through the “product specifications” link on the epinions product page. Next, from my rating of two stars, you can probably guess I haven’t many nice things to say about the Nikon SQ… you are partly correct but please do read on…

Foreword
Honestly, I have never used Nikon cameras before. I only know that they produce excellent photos, especially since after a friend of mine came home from Australia and showed me pictures she had taken with a Nikon SLR. I was truly impressed, and she used only the bundled lens too. Then, when I went shopping for a digital camera earlier this year and the Nikon CoolPix 2100 was on my shortlist. The various sample pictures taken with Nikon CoolPix cameras I had downloaded from various independent review sites on the Internet convinced me that Nikon digital cameras also produced high quality photos. I eventually decided on the Canon PowerShot A60 because of its better value for money and I have absolutely no regrets except perhaps not shelling just a bit more for the A70 instead.

Anyways, needless to say when my brother told me he was shopping for a digicam also, I immediately recommended him a Canon. Then he said he wanted Nikon so I asked him to get a CoolPix 3100. He went home with a Nikon SQ instead, after falling victim to the salesperson’s Nikon sales pitch – the guy showed him pictures from the Nikon SQ and a Canon Ixus on a TV set, and the Nikon SQ’s pictures looked nicer to my brother.

Thinking he had bought a really cool looking camera that also produces great pictures he brought it home eager to start shooting with it. When we downloaded the pictures to my laptop…I was immediately drawn to… GRAIN, grain and more grain! The SQ’s pictures were extremely noisy and the noise levels was the first thing we noticed, not the green trees of the park or the swan in the lake, it was the highly objectionable noise! I was very much surprised as I had expected the Nikon to take very good pictures.

SQ for square
The SQ comes with a 16MB Compact Flash card, small rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack, Cool-Station camera dock, AC adapter, USB cable, Video cable, software CDs and manuals.

ACTUAL USE AND PERFORMANCE

There aren’t a lot of user-controllable features on the SQ. There are a variety of preset shooting modes accessible through the LCD menu such as Snow, Cloudy, Landscapes, Sunset and others and the user can choose file compression levels of Fine, Normal and Basic and also resolution sizes of Large, Medium and Small. White balance is also user-selectable. Pretty basic creative controls, the camera really controls everything else automatically. You cannot set aperture sizes (the SQ has two sizes only on auto step-switch – f2.7 and f5.4), shutter speeds (auto 2-1/2000th) or ISO rating (about ISO 70 in most pictures I took but one of my shots showed ISO 200).

The SQ’s LCD is also stingy when it comes to displaying information. Only the basics are displayed such as picture quality and resolution, and number of shots left. I would have liked to see ISO, aperture and shutter speed information as well.

So the SQ really is a very user-friendly camera in that it takes most of the decision making out of the photographer’s hands! But more creative options would have been welcome, plus an option to select even lower compression levels.

I took pictures in the morning of mostly nature stuff like plants and gardens, flowers and also people and kids. Then in the afternoon, it became cloudy and I again went out to take landscape shots, plants and other outdoor subjects. Before that, in the morning I took indoor photos of the kids and pets.

During the outdoor shoot, since it was cloudy, the camera fired the flash quite often to illuminate the foreground. Pretty soon, the battery exhausted warning began to appear so I headed back to download the photos to my laptop.

Using the Cool-Station, all I had to do was pop the camera in, press the download button and the Nikon View software would start automatically on my Windows XP system and begin transferring images. Quite convenient, kinda like Kodak’s EasyShare camera dock I guess.

Like I mentioned earlier, I am not too impressed by the camera’s picture quality. There is just too much noise (pictures are way too grainy). Even at the FINE quality setting and ISO 70, the noise is definitely there and it gets worse with lower quality settings. I wonder why this is so when other Nikons have been known for their high picture quality before.

The colors are good though, although a bit dull sometimes. The white balance is also quite accurate, handling indoor shots with both incandescent and fluorescent lighting very well.

The camera uses a green focus-assist light which also acts as the red-eye reduction lamp. Let me tell you that this light is a tiny little thing next to the camera’s flash light but it sure does emit a VERY bright light! So this also makes it work well as a red eye reduction lamp.

Another things that irks me is the camera does seem to take a very long time to write the picture data to the storage card. For example, after shooting a landscape photo, I have to wait a few long seconds before being able to start shooting the next photo as the camera displays a "write-to-card" flashing icon. Not good at all.


Design flaws
Lens
The SQ has a lens “barrel” that rotates 180 degrees either to the front of the camera or to the back. The flaw here is that it isn’t really helpful with shooting over-the-head pictures. It does, however, help you frame subjects that are above your eyelevel without you having to crane your neck and point the camera upwards.

Also, when you try to take a self-portrait, the lens when rotated to the back, points directly at you. The major design flaw here is that the lens now obscures more than half of the LCD so you can no longer see yourself to frame that self-portrait! The camera tries to “cleverly” squeeze the LCD image into a smaller frame on the visible side of the LCD but it really doesn’t work for me.

Another part of the lens design flaw is that the lens has no built-in lens cap. Nikon includes a separate cap on a strap but this cap and strap always seem to be in the way, even when you’re trying to dock the camera in the Cool-Station.

Buttons
While I had the camera out with me always ready to snap, I didn’t have to nitpick to quickly make out a list of design flaws. The most annoying one of all would have to be the placement of the on-off switch and the zoom buttons. The on/off button is actually a rocker switch built around the shutter button. You turn it with your finger to turn it on. In most conventional zoom cameras, rocker switches on shutter buttons are usually used to zoom in or out, much like on the Canon A60/A70. The zoom buttons are two buttons on the top left side of the back panel.

Indeed you might have guessed, I always ended up turning off the camera unintentionally when what I meant to do was zoom in onto my subject. This is because the way the camera is designed, you would probably have to hold it with your thumb resting on the back panel where the zoom buttons are for support, and you use your index to press the shutter. Ideally, the zoom control should be moved to the on/off switch and the thumb rest area left vacant of buttons. This is because I find trying to press the zoom buttons with my thumb causes me to lose stability and support of the camera as soon as my thumb moves to press either of the two zoom buttons.

Battery life
The small proprietary battery doesn’t last very long. I had only taken about 40-50 pictures when it started to flash its low-battery warning on the LCD. Flash use is about 60% of the time. When the SQ won’t take pictures anymore, it’ll display a message that says “battery exhausted.” This is when you need to pop it into the Cool-Station and charging takes about 90 minutes. The Cool-Station also is able to accept a second battery in an extra compartment but the camera’s battery will be charged first (no simultaneous charging). By comparison, the Canon S45’s battery lasts double the time and also takes about only 90 minutes to charge.

Clearly, the SQ is not a camera you want to take along with you for picture taking trips as far as battery life is concerned. Even a second battery pack which costs an additional $30 can only provide you with another hour or so of shooting.

Conclusion
The SQ is considered a boutique camera, one aimed at a special niche market. It’s small, relatively light, compact and trendy. It’s a little square metal camera that simply exudes coolness. Unfortunately, it’s also Nikon’s Achilles heels at this point. I would highly recommend Nikon to pull this camera off the shelves, its engineers go back and redesign its imaging system and then perhaps reintroduce it. Otherwise, this camera is definitely going to cost Nikon it’s high reputation as a respectable camera maker.

This camera proves two things:
It’s sometimes better to just wait and see instead of jumping out there and getting the latest in gadgets, and,
Always wait for other professional reviews to post sample photos first online so you can see them yourself. The sites I went to stated that Nikon requested they not post sample photos because the reviewed units were pre-production models.

For beginners out there, you can do so much better elsewhere. For those looking for a cool, trendy “boutique” camera, you too can do much better elsewhere. Hopefully in the future, I’d get to write a more positive review of a Nikon digicam…till then, happy snapping!