NIKON, KNOWN BETTER for their excellent lineup of DSLRs also make some very good compact cameras. The company's Coolpix S51 is an 8MP camera with 3x optical stabilized zoom lens that does not protrude far from the camera body when powered on or even when zoomed in. It also sports a fairly large three inch LCD screen for preview. Navigation is by way of a rotary dial type key which can also be clicked along the 4-axis to access self timer, flash, macro and exposure compensation. The rotary switch is used to scroll through various options in each menu item while a center button is used to confirm the selection. This apart, there are dedicated buttons for playback, mode, menu and deletion.

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In our outdoor tests, we noticed that, like the Canons, the Nikon does not overexpose images when the scene contains both bright and dark areas, with the result that the image can look a bit dark. Color levels are set fine and the images look rich but not over saturated. At ISO 400 or less, indoor shooting was very impressive. Texture details were brought out in areas where other cameras failed. Both with and without flash, the camera performs well in low light, second only to the Samsungs, so long as you use lower ISO numbers (or flash). But try anything above ISO 400 and your image is riddled with noise. In video shooting, colors seemed a bit washed out but compression artifacts (like blocks) were not visible. A minute's video at VGA resolution at 30 fps takes about 75MB.