The S10 is a good camera with some compromises that look as though they have been forced on the designers by the marketing department who want to promise the customer a camera that does all the thinking, right down to recognising a face just in case you don’t know what one looks like!

With its split body design allowing more flexibility and creativity than normal when framing shots, and a compact shape that offers a fully internal stabilized 10X zoom, the most surprising aspect of Coolpix S10 is that it has a very reasonable street price, making it excellent value for the money.

Despite its powerful zoom and sophisticated 6-megapixel sensor, this camera is aimed at the point-and-click crowd. Manual controls have been kept to the minimum, with Nikon instead providing a good range of pre-sets, including the self explanatory Face Priority mode. Nikon’s DLighting system rescues underexposed images or shots with too much back-light, too.

I was very pleased with the Nikon Coolpix S10. Picture quality was impressive and the camera is easy to use compared to other super zoom digital cameras. It is also smaller and more compact than other similar models. Recommended.

If it had been introduced two years ago it would have absolutely skunked the competition – today it may not be the best choice for smart digicam buyers. Potential purchasers might want to wait and check out the soon to be released Canon Powershot TX1. The TX1 may look quite different from the S10, but it is in fact a very comparable camera.

But the faltering telephoto focus, awkward ergonomics and the cumulative effect of all the minor image quality issues and other annoyances make it a difficult camera to recommend over a compact ‘super zoom’ like the Canon S3 IS or Panasonic DMC-FZ7 (the new Panasonic TZ2 looks promising too).

I’m usually the first to applaud any camera manufacturer who dares to come out with something different in the face of identikit parades of compacts – and that design is love it or hate it – so I tried hard to find positives that outweighed the negative. But the Nikon Coolpix S10 ultimately proves that you shouldn’t revisit past glories unless you can do it better.

The selling points of this camera are the flexibility of the design and the powerful zoom. Neither of these will let prospective purchasers down, but anyone looking for a more general camera will be disappointed by the image quality overall and the problematic flash.

The Nikon Coolpix S10 is a well-made and attractively finished camera with some useful capabilities, excellent noise handling and is capable of producing good results under the right circumstances. However, lacklustre performance, terminally slow AF, poor low-light capability and awkward handling limits its appeal. It is also expensive compared to rival cameras with superior performance, so the overall outlook is bleak.