The slightly rounded edges and blocky shape make the S700 easy to grip firmly and operate with one hand, and the camera has a nice balance in hand. The controls have a solid feel for the most part, though for whatever reason, the combined scroll wheel/d-pad on several of the current-generation Nikon compacts feels cheap Nikon Camera Charger and insubstantial. The thin plastic battery door doesn’t have a nice feeling either.
While I’m not wild about the build quality of the thumb wheel itself, I find Nikon’s two-menu, scroll-through interface approach easy to navigate. The minimalist and slightly small control arrangement is logically sorted around the scroll wheel, and the wide/tele control feels reasonably nice and not too small.
If you’ve used a recent Nikon compact, not a lot has changed in this area. Remembering which of the two menus, there’s a shooting menu as well as a separate, more general set-up and mode selection menu, certain functions are sorted into can be tricky at first, but the inclusion of dedicated buttons for exposure compensation, flash, and macro settings makes quick adjustments easy. Users can select either an icon-based or a text-based menu system as well, and after a little familiarization time the icon-based menus were much quicker to use and eliminated page after page of scrolling. Putting white balance and ISO controls on their own dedicated buttons instead of in the shooting menu would have earned some appreciation from more advanced users, but since the S700 Nikon Coolpix Camera Charger is primarily an auto-mode camera, this isn’t necessarily an oversight.
Combining default full-auto capability with some program-style adjustments, the single Shooting mode is intuitive and straightforward in its operation. In addition to the global adjustments mentioned above, users control white balance, drive mode, color mode, ISO, and AF mode via the shooting menu. Though it provides no truly manual functions, shooting mode offers enough flexibility to deal with most shooting situations. Serious photographers may notice the lack of selectable metering modes on the S700, but all other major areas of adjustment are well covered.
While the Coolpix S700 is certainly not perfect, there's a lot to like about this camera. Image sharpness and overall quality are truly impressive, the camera exposes and renders colors well, and ease of use is very good. Slowness in some areas proves to be a wart, but with locked focus the S700 Nikon Coolpix Battery Charger is impressively fast as well. Perhaps most surprising, however, is just how well this 12-megapixel compact works in low-light situations. All of this comes together in a package that is stylish and functional, making the S700 one of the better small cameras currently on the market.
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