I was in desperate need of a new digital camera! I have an OLD version of Nikon coolpix 4800 but I love the 8x optical zoom. My friends all made fun of the giant size of it! After I saw the S630 coolpix advertised I really wanted to try it out. I went to the store and played around with it then purchased it through Amazon and got a great deal! I am VERY pleased with this camera! I took it to the Lake with me and played around with it and got some good shots! I was even able to record video of my friends innertubing at full zoom and the clarity is great! I have the settings on auto mode and the camera does a great job! All I can say is some of these negative reviews must be due to user error or they are professional photographers expecting TOO much! If you are interested in this camera, I must say I am VERY happy with my purchase. If I could figure it out, I'd share some of the great pics and videos I took! Good luck with your purchase!

I purchased a Nikon Coolpix S630 just before I went to Europe five weeks ago. After 1000 pictures of mountain tops, people, dark museums and action shots, I am done testing it and am very pleased. For years I wanted a hassle-free camera with a high amount of optical zoom yet small in size and shoots well without a lot of light. I hoped to spend less money but was afraid a cheaper camera would frustrate me due to lack of features, poor quality or confusing operation. The S630 gives me all I want in a camera for a reasonable price.

My cousin was a professional photographer and he is impressed with how well this camera performs. Closeups of flowers are great. Pictures displayed on a 42" TV have great resolution and color accuracy. Photos of poorly lit rooms have bright colors. Video and audio quality also are impressive.

Reading reviews critical of this camera made me a little nervous about deciding to buy this camera but I am glad that I figured out they are overly critical except for the zoom speed. The zoom motor is too fast and you often overshoot where you want it to stop. All too often it will not stop where you want it to and you have to step forward or backward to frame the shot. No camera will always produce a perfect shot on the automatic setting. Photography is a learned skill. The large screen lets you see if the shot did not come out right. You learn and try one of the other settings available. Battery life was roughly 125? pics. Time between pics is a little slow, but OK.

Pros: Quality pictures, video and audio; 7x optical zoom in a small body; logical hassle-free operation; reasonable price; low light pics are outstanding; has many other nice features.

Cons: 1) Zoom speed as described above. 2) The Nikon S630 requires a special battery so you need to pay about $30 more for a spare battery that you need to keep charged at all times. 3) The software included has no editing capability just viewing and transferring. 4) The optional Leather Case (Nikon #5811) is too small to carry a spare battery or extra memory card. I bought a case at Wal-Mart that works perfectly. It was a little tight at first, but it stretched out after a couple days.

This is actually my second Coolpix 630. My first one was stolen. I immediately ordered another one because dollar for dollar no other camera can produce the results I got from this small and handy powerhouse.

The zoom is great at 7X optical, and 12 megapixel gives me all the resolution any normal user will ever need. Easy to use features, including an "auto" that does all the work for you. I can even make movies.

I studied long and hard before I bought and my research paid off handsomely. I strongly recommend this product. My only suggestion is to spend the $40 for a 150X memory card for ultra-fast operation between shots.

I bought this for travel so I would not have to carry my Nikon D70. The pictures have the same expected quality as from my SLR camera. The zoom control is not as flexible as I would like. It seems to want to go from one extreme to the other rather than slowly letting you choose the power of zoom. Other than that it is extremely nice to carry, fits easily in my jeans pocket or my purse.

This is the fourth Nikon camera I have had, and like the others I was not disappointed. The camera takes great pictures, even when zoomed out. The only fault I find with the camera is that the zoom button is too touchy. The menu is easy to navigate and gives you lots of ways to personalize your picture taking. Unlike some cameras this camera even takes great night photos, even when hand held. Would highly recommend this camera.

I received my camera 3 days ago, and so far so good! The size and look of the camera is awesome, very sleek and perfect to toss in my purse to have at ALL times. The picture quality so far has been outstanding, especialy outdoors. Great camera for normal everyday use. The retouch option works really well, and overall is very easy to figure out! So far my only complaint would be that on the continuous mode it is a little hard to keep the camera still enough to take quality pictures so close together. That could possibly be user error though....

i don't buy many cameras. here's my 20-year photo history: this nikon replaces a panasonic lumix FS5, which met an untimely end two weeks ago. that camera replaced an older digital sony point-and-shoot, and that in turn replaced a very basic-model canon 35mm SLR (which i very likely never used to its full potential).

i've now owned the nikon for 3 whole days, and it has provided the most fun i've had with a camera since i had my old 35mm, but without the hassle of film development (and the accompanying crapshoot of "how will the pics turn out?"). i've drained three batteries so far and taken i can't remember how many hundreds of sample pics without any real problems to report.

i'm not a HUGE camera nerd or photography snob, but i like to think i can take a decent picture now and then. i'm probably close to the definition of "casual photographer." here, then, are my impressions of the nikon S630, beginning right out of the box:

the design is great. i'm an above-average-sized guy, with pretty big hands, yet the controls are easily placed and i have yet to mash the wrong button (or combo of them) with any of my giant thumbs. my girlfriend uses a small kodak digital, and the shutter and power buttons are so close on that camera that i turn the thing off as often as i snap a successful pic. not so with my new nikon, i'm happy to report, yet the case is small enough and the controls placed so that a person with normal-sized hands should find it just as easy and comfortable as i do.

battery and memory card are both a standard design, no brand-specific special purchases required. hooray for that!

the controls are well placed (the dial, or at least the ribs on it could be a tiny bit larger for my own ease of use, but that's not a real problem), and their use as well as the menu options they lead to are reassuringly and happily clear and easy to follow (definitely unlike my experience with my last panasonic). i find that i actually LIKE tinkering with the settings while using this camera! i'm also one of those annoying people who don't like to read the manuals that come with their gadgets, and have been able to figure out pretty much everything i've wanted to without having to crack a page. that says something positive about the camera, right?

shutter speed is GREAT. the autofocus is very fast, with only minimal hesitation or fluctuation - even when the zoom is fully extended (the sony and panasonic both took AGES to focus themselves). the zoom itself is great: at 7x, closeups are REALLY close, and the clarity of menu options has so far meant that the closeups i've taken are nice and clear, not grainy or blurred half the time like with previous cameras. the burst feature is much better engineered than on my panasonic (the slight loss of image quality when using this feature is acceptable - ya gotta make the occasional sacrifice for speed). i haven't done much with the movie or voice options, just a little sampling with each, but they seem fine as well.

image quality has been great so far. my panasonic may have had a slight edge here (which may just be the result of having used it longer and been more familiar with it), but the pixellation and off-color problems i've read about in other reviews have not occurred thus far. low-light shots have turned out just fine, too (another problem i've read about others having).

i can't say much for the durability or longevity of this unit, or for nikon's customer service, as i've only had it a very short time. fingers crossed that i don't have to amend this review on either of those scores.

this camera seems to have received more mixed reviews than any other i checked out before buying. i'm not sure where the problems these other folks are having are coming from. it's a pocket camera, really, and meant for the casual photographer as opposed to the professional - do they expect it to make their morning coffee too? for my purposes (family, pets, vacation & nature shots, car shows, the occasional sports event, still lifes of stuff to sell on the 'net), and for those of people with similar needs, it ought to work just fine.

i may not know enough about them to be a full-fledged camera snob, but i am fairly picky about my gadgets and toys. so far, the nikon S630 has been a joy to work with. unless it explodes or catches fire while i'm using it the day after the warranty expires, i'm sold!

Product design is flawed. Very poor picture quality that is not typical of a Nikon branded product. Pictures are very noisy, even with decent ambient lighting at low ISO (eg, 100 or 200). VR doesn't work very well and the auto white balance is awful. The camera looks great and feels good in the hand. I bought this camera because I like the idea of the 7X optical zoom in a small point and shoot, but what is the point of such a great zoom if the picture quality is so disappointing.

I assumed that my camera must have shipped with beta firmware and that an upgrade would fix these problems; however, at the time of this writing no firmware updates are available. This camera is a significant downgrade in terms of image quality over my 3 year old Casio Exilim EX-Z850. Unfortunately I'm returning the S630 to Amazon.

This is a good camera for it being an ultra compact. Don't let the 7x optical zoom advertisment fool you, it's actually 4x optical and 3x digital zoom. Tough camera too, my wife actually dropped it on our wooden floor and this thing still ticks! It takes good indoor pics and great outdoor pics. The various scene options make pic taking even better! We were trying to take pics of various objects in the house from max optical zoom and it had a hard time focusing on it. This was also at night. It sometimes does take a while for it focus on non human objects and beings. We were taking pics of our dog, also from a slight distance, and it took about 10 sec to focus completely on her. We took this camera with on vacation, and took pics of city scapes (like the tall buildings in chicago, cincinatti at night), and it captures the pics perfectly from a moving vehicle going 75MPH as if you were standing still! This was on the "high ISO" and auto scene selector settings and no flash. For best pic taking, I've had to explain to my wife and friends that you must lightly press the button down and the screen will change slightly to a better focus, then press it down to snap the pic when you're ready and it'll come out perfect! It takes really good video and captures audio decently too. I think the camera takes it's best pics without the flash. Otherwise this is a great camera to do just about anything with. Very fast boot up and the menu is easy to navigate. Very nice LCD display too. We haven't been disappointed with this camera yet and we've owned it since mid March 2009.

I just purchased this camera. I have been using a Casio Exilim for about 3 years and I was looking for a new point and shoot with decent zoom.

I have only had the camera for a couple of days and was a little concerned at some of the bad reviews that I have seen here and on other sites. Well - I have to say that so far, I am extremely pleased. The zoom feature is fantastic. Yes, it takes a little getting used to the control for the zoom, but once you get the hang if it, it is great.

Also, the camera takes great pictures in low light. This was another thing i was looking for.

Jumping from the 7 MP camera to this 12 MP camera also definitely is a great improvement as well.

I would definitely recommend this camera.