Nikon Coolpix S9300 Pro Reviews

These problems, allied with the hefty price of £300/$350, make it hard to recommend the Nikon Coolpix S9300, despite its many strengths. It's especially hard considering the fact that the Panasonic TZ30 costs just a little more in the UK, and the same in the US. The Panasonic TZ30 is smaller and lighter, has a better battery life, an even wider and longer zoom and more sophisticated video functions. Or if you don't want to pay the extra money and are happy with a 16x zoom, the Panasonic TZ20 currently sells for about £90/$100 less than the Nikon Coolpix S9300, and has similar features. Nikon has crammed a wide range of valuable features into the relatively slim body of the Nikon Coolpix S9300. Overall it is an enjoyable camera to use and feels sturdy. However, the underwhelming battery life, imperfect general image quality and questionable reliability make rival models a wiser choice.

While the S9300 is certainly a capable compact camera, in a competitive marketplace, the S9300 struggles to stand out. Unfortunately it’s lacking in advanced functionality, while a few image quality and usability issues are irksome. So, while its certainly a compact worthy of consideration it just misses out on ranking up there with the very best.

I've been a street photographer for most of my adult life so I really like compact P&S digicams - they are small enough to drop in a shirt pocket, tough enough to go just about anywhere, they generally produce first-rate images with little effort on the part of the shooter, and they are un-intimidating to subjects. The S9300's 18x (25-450mm equivalent) zoom provides an amazing focal length range for such an easily pocketable little P&S digicam. Compact digicam zooms have traditionally featured focal length ranges in the 3x to 10x range, so a shirt pocket digital camera with an 18x zoom radically increases both reach and stand-off distance for shooters. A DSLR shooter would need a camera bag full of heavy (and expensive) lenses to cover the same range. In fact, there are only a couple things preventing the S9300 from becoming the darling of the mini-cam demographic - its lack of manual exposure capabilities and its soft telephoto images.

While the Nikon Coolpix S9300 represents an excellent value and offers a nice point-and-shoot feature set, its photo quality is poor relative to the competition, with mediocre low light shooting and below-par battery life.

The Nikon Coolpix S9300 is a compact shooter with a sharp 18x zoom lens and a GPS, but slow start up time and muddy image quality at higher ISOs make it a tough camera to recommend.

The Nikon Coolpix S9300 is one of the cheapest travel zooms with GPS and lots of zoom making it good value for money. It's available in a number of colours, with the red looking particularly stylish. The camera produces reasonably good image quality when using the camera at its lowest ISO settings with better results at the wider end of the zoom. It has a number of useful features including HDR, high speed shooting, scene modes and auto-scene detection. Handling is good with a large rubber grip on the rear of the camera, and the camera is well made. However focus can be sluggish at the telephoto end, this particularly hurts video quality when using zoom. Noise is also higher than expected, but the high value for money could make this camera apealling.

The S series of Nikon's Coolpix digital compact cameras are the Stylish options for the fashion conscious. They're still easy to use but have all sorts of extra modes and features to justify the upgrade from a cheaper model, which explains why GPS and Full HD video are included on the S9300. The part(s) of the Nikon Coolpix S9300 that we've been most impressed with throughout the entire test is the focusing system. That includes the lens, even though it produces horrible purple fringing in places. What we also didn't get from the lens is any barrel distortion or pincushion. Not bad for a 25mm wide lens. The pictures were lovely and sharp though and the low-level light performance is also pretty good thanks to the lens and a good noise result from the back-illuminated sensor.

The Nikon S9300 is a serviceable camera, in that there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it’s just not able to keep up with the steep curve of the competition. The camera’s image quality isn’t as good as its S9100 predecessor due to the unnecessary megapixel increase; the zoom isn’t as wide-ranging as its competitors; there are no manual controls and the battery life is limited. The combination of these points, and the fact that the model is no cheaper than its strongest competitor, the Panasonic TZ30, leaves the S9300 exposed to the elements: it’s just not quite there.

Nikon clearly knows how to make high quality cameras, but this effort to impress hapless shoppers with large megapixel ratings is a big disappointment, especially at this premium price.

The Nikon Coolpix S9300 is a good choice for anyone after a pure point-and-shoot experience and a long zoom lens. You might want to wait for it to go on sale, though, simply because it's a bit overpriced compared to what Canon and Panasonic are offering. Or if you don't want the GPS, 3D photo mode, or mind popping up your own flash, you might want to save yourself some money and buy an S9100 before they're gone.