Buy a 1 S2 Digital Camera with 11-27.5mm Lens – Yellow
Introduction
The Nikon 1 S2 is a new compact system camera featuring a 14-megapixel “CX†format sensor with no low-pass filter and the Nikon 1 lens mount. Boasting continuous shooting speeds of 20fps with continuous autofocus and 60fps with fixed-point autofocus, Full HD 60p video capture, an improved hybrid auto-focus system, Best Moment Capture and the unique Motion Snapshot Mode, the Nikon S2 also offers more conventional shooting modes like Programmed Auto, Aperture and Shutter Priority, as well as Metered Manual. Also on-board is a 3-inch LCD display with 460k-dots, an electronic shutter, a sensitivity range of ISO 200-12,800, latest EXPEED 4A image-processing engine, and a built-in pop-up flash. The Nikon 1 S2 is available in white, black, red and yellow. The Nikon 1 S2 retails for $450 / £380 with the 11-27.5mm f/3.5-5.6 standard zoom lens, or $700 / £430 with the 11-27.5mm standard zoom and 30-110mm telezoom lenses.
Ease of Use
The Nikon 1 S2 is mostly made out of plastic, weighing in at a mere 190g for the body only, 7g less than the previous S1model. It feels better made than the official product shots would have you believe. With an essentially grip-less design, the Nikon S2 is very much a two-handed affair that requires you to hold the camera’s weight in the left hand, clutching the lens, and use your right hand for balance and operating the controls.
The Nikon 1 S2 has a clean, minimalist front plate that’s dominated by the Nikon 1 lens mount. Instead of being a scaled-down version of the good old F mount, it’s a completely new design that provides 100% electronic communication between the attached lens and the camera body, courtesy of a dozen contacts. Just like on the manufacturer’s F-mount SLR cameras, there is a white dot for easy lens alignment, although it has moved from the 2 o’clock position (when viewed front on) to the top of the mount. The lenses themselves feature a short silver ridge on the lens barrel, which needs to be in alignment with said dot in order for you to be able to attach the lens to the camera. While this may require a bit of getting used to, it actually makes changing lenses quicker and easier.
With no lens attached, you can see the sensor sitting right behind the plane of the bayonet mount. The S2′s sensor is the same 14 megapixel imager as previously used by the older J3 model. Measuring 13.2×8.8mm this “CX” format imaging chip has double the surface area of the biggest imagers used in compact and bridge cameras like the Fujifilm X20 and S200FS, but only about half the area of a standard Four Thirds sensor. In linear terms, a Four Thirds chip has a 1.36x longer diagonal than the Nikon CX imager. Given that Four Thirds has a 2x focal length multiplier, the CX “crop factor” works out to about 2.72, meaning that a 10mm lens has approximately the same angle of view as a 27.2mm lens on an FX or 35mm film camera. The Nikon 1 Nikkor 11-27.5mm standard zoom is thus equivalent to a 29.9-74.8mm (or, practically speaking, 30-75mm) FX lens in terms of its angle-of-view range.
The rest of the Nikon S2′s faceplate is almost empty, featuring only the lens release button and an AF assist/self-timer lamp. There’s no grip at all on the glossy smooth front of the Nikon 1 S2.
Front
Rear
There are two ways of powering on the Nikon 1 S2. You can either use the on/off button sitting next to the shutter release or, if you have a collapsible-barrel zoom lens attached such as the supplied 11-27.5mm kit lens, you can simply press the unlocking button on the lens barrel and turn the zoom ring to unlock the lens, an act that causes the camera to switch on automatically. This is an ingenious solution as you need to unlock the lens for shooting anyway. Start-up takes just over a second – nothing to write home about but still decent and entirely adequate.
You can frame your shots using the rear screen – there’s no optical or electronic viewfinder. The LCD screen is the same three-inch, 460,000-dot display as on the previous model, which boasts wide viewing angles, good definition and accurate colours and improved visibility in strong daylight. We missed an EVF when using the S2, as holding the camera up to eye-level helps to stabilise the lens and avoid camera shake.
The control layout is rather peculiar. The Nikon 1 S2 doesn’t have a shooting mode dial – instead you have to dive into the rather long-winded and not entirely logical menu to find them. The S2′s mode menu has five settings, Motion Snapshot, Best Moment Capture, Auto for beginners, the Creative mode, and Advanced Movie. The Creative mode in turn contains the PASM and a variety of scene modes.
The four-way controller on the rear also has four functions mapped onto its Up, Right, Down and Left buttons; including the “F” function, exposure compensation, flash mode and self-timer, respectively. Although this isn’t a bad choice of functions, the fact that there is no ISO button will doubtlessly cause a lot of photographers interested in buying the Nikon S2 to be unhappy.
Front
Side
The F button now opens a mini GUI with aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focus mode, metering, picture control white balance all available at the touch of a button, a big improvement on the S1′s more limited implementation. The S2 has a a scroll wheel around the four-way pad which is used to set the shutter speed in Manual and Shutter Priority modes (once you’ve found them in the menu, that is). Last but not least, there are three small buttons around the navigation pad, flush against the rear panel of the camera, including Playback, Menu and Delete.
The Auto shooting mode is for beginners, with a much reduced set of options on offer (image quality, image size and continuous). The Nikon S2′s Scene Auto Selector is a smart auto mode in which the camera analyses the scene in front of its lens and picks what it thinks is the right mode for that particular scene. The Creative Mode is where you will want to be most of the time. With the mode dial set to this position, you can pick your desired exposure mode from the menu. You can also choose one of the conventional PASM modes, which give you full menu access and the ability to manually set the aperture, shutter speed, or both (Program AE Shift is available in P mode). ISO and white balance can also be manually selected, but only from the menu, as already mentioned.
Of course there’s AWB and auto ISO as well, with the latter coming in three flavours (Auto 100-800, 100-3200 or 100-6400) allowing you to specify how high you want the camera to go when the light gets low. You can also choose from three AF Area modes, including Auto Area, in which the camera takes control of what it focuses on (this isn’t a great mode to have as your default as the camera obviously can’t read your mind and may focus on something else than your actual subject); Single Point, in which you can pick one of 135 AF points by first hitting OK and then moving the active AF point around the frame using the four-way pad; and Subject Tracking, in which you pick your subject, press OK and allow the camera to track that subject as it moves around, as long as it doesn’t leave the frame of course.
Pop-up Flash
Top
The Nikon 1 S2 has an intriguing hybrid auto-focus system that combines contrast- and phase-difference detection in a similar fashion as the Fujifilm F300EXR did. This allows the Nikon 1 S2 to focus extremely quickly in good light, even on a moving subject. The company claims the Nikon 1 system cameras are the fastest-focusing machines in the world, and this matches our experience – as long as there’s enough light. When light levels drop, the camera switches to contrast-detect AF which, though faster than on most cameras, isn’t nearly as fast as the other method. It’s always the camera that decides which AF method to use – the user has no influence on this.
Generally speaking, the S2 will usually only resort to contrast detection when light levels are low. In good light, we were able to take sharp photos of fast-moving subjects. The Nikon S2 certainly does not disappoint here. Manual focusing is also possible, although the Nikon 1 lenses do not have focus rings. If you want to focus manually, you first have to hit the AF button, choose MF, press OK and then use the scroll wheel to adjust focus. To assist you with this, the Nikon S2 magnifies the central part of the image and displays a rudimentary focus scale along the right side of the frame – but those are the only focusing aids you get. There’s still no peaking function available as on some rival models..
The S2 has an electronic shutter (the top-of-the-range V3 also has a mechanical shutter). It’s completely silent (the focus confirmation beep can be disabled from the menu) and allows the use of shutter speeds as fast as 1/16,000th of a second and, with the Electronic Hi setting selected, lets you shoot full-resolution stills at 60 frames per second. Note however that while this is a major achievement, it’s limited by a buffer that can only hold 40 raw files. Additionally, the use of this mode precludes AF tracking – you have to lower the frame rate to a still very fast 20fps if you want that – and the viewfinder goes blank while the pictures are being taken. About the only application we can think of where shooting full-resolution stills at 60fps could really come in handy is AE bracketing for HDR imaging. At this rate, a series of 5 bracketed shots could be taken in less than 0.1 second, rendering small movements that can otherwise pose alignment problems – like leaves being blown in the wind – a non-issue. Alas, the Nikon S2 still doesn’t offer such a feature – in fact it does not offer autoexposure bracketing at all, something that was also missing in the S1.
The Nikon 1 S2 can be set to shoot Full HD video footage, and you get to choose from 1080p at 60fps or 30fps or 1080i at 60fps, a step-up from the S1′s 60i mode. If you don’t need Full HD, there’s also 720p at 60fps, which is really smooth and still counts as high definition. Secondly, you now get full manual control over exposure in video mode. This is an option; you don’t have to shoot in M mode but you can if that’s what you need. Thirdly, you get fast, continuous AF in video mode, and it works well, especially in good light. Movies are compressed using the H.264 codec and stored as MOV files.
There are separate shutter release buttons for stills and video, and thanks to this – as well as the massive processing power of the Nikon S2 – you can take multiple full-resolution stills even while recording HD video. This works in the other way round too – you can capture a movie clip even when the mode dial is in the Still Image position, simply by pressing the red movie shutter release. We found that in this case the camera will invariably record the video at 720p/60fps. New to the S2 is the Auto Image Capture mode, which analyses every video frame and automatically records a still image when conditions are best, while the addition of Fast Motion, Jump Cut, and 4-Second Movie modes extend the S2′s video versatility even further.
Memory Card Slot
Battery Compartment
In addition to being capable of shooting regular movies in HD quality, the Nikon 1 S2 can also shoot video at 400fps for slow-motion playback. The resolution is lower and the aspect ratio is an ultra-widescreen 2.67:1, but the quality is adequate for YouTube, Vimeo and the like. These videos are played back at 30fps, which is more than 13x slower than the capture speed of 400fps, allowing you to get creative and show the world an array of interesting phenomena that happen too quickly to observe in real time. The Nikon S2 goes even further by offering a 1200fps video mode, but the resolution and overall quality is too poor for that to be genuinely useful.
The Nikon 1 S2 can shoot both RAW and JPEG files, but annoyingly there’s still no Raw + JPEG option, a rather surprising omission that perhaps reflects Nikon targeting this camera firmly to the beginner end of the market. Still, at least the S2 hasn’t dispensed with RAW format support altogether.
There are now three Best Moment Capture modes. Smart Photo Selector allows the camera to capture no less than 20 photos at a single press of the shutter release, including some that were taken before fully depressing the button. The S2 analyses the individual pictures in the series and discards 15 of them, keeping only the five that it thinks are best in terms of sharpness and composition. This feature can be genuinely useful when photographing fast action and fleeting moments. The new Active Selection mode takes up to 40 full-resolution shots in less than a second and lets you choose the one to keep. The Slow View mode captures up to 40 full-resolution continuous shots and displays them in slow motion on the LCD screen, making it easier for you to select the exact moment that you want to keep from the burst sequence.
The new Creative Palette is available in the camera’s Creative Mode and effectively allows you to adjust the brightness, saturation simply by sliding your finger around the ring on the touchscreen or by rotating the multi selector dial, with a live preview before the picture is taken. In the innovative Motion Snapshot mode the S2 records a brief high-definition movie – whose buffering starts at a half-press of the shutter release, so again includes events that had happened before the button was fully depressed – and also takes a still photograph. The movie and the still image are now saved in a single MOV file, making them much easier to share than on the older S1.
The Nikon S2 now stores photos and videos on microSD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, seemingly a consequence of the camera’s reduction in size. The camera runs on a smaller EN-EL22 battery to its V3 big brother, and is consequently capable of producing considerably less shots on a single charge, managing around 230, although it does help to make the camera body more compact. This also means that changing batteries or cards is not possible while the S2 is mounted on a tripod, as the hinges of the battery/card compartment door are too close to the tripod mount.
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Article source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2013/dec/30/sony-dsc-qx10-smartphone-lens-review
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