I have been contemplating the upgrade of my Canon SD500 camera for a while now. It’s showing its age (and my abuse of it – I’m hard on these little guys) in a variety of ways and we have enough upcoming trips that it seemed like a good time to get a new camera and get familiar with it before hitting the road. So I read some reviews, then went to Best Buy and looked over their selection. My eye was first drawn to the Canon SD750, a 7.1 megapixel camera with lots of neat features, but the sales guy was more jazzed with the Nikon Coolpix S50. It was the same price as the Canon, but it had a built-in image stabilizer and the zoom (3x optical) doesn’t extend – it’s all internal. Very trippy! Hefet-wise, the Nikon had an edge on the Canon. Neither had a viewfinder, but the screens looked good. So after several years of Canons I took the plunge and got the Nikon. I’ve been shooting with it for the past week, and have learned that it has some (to my mind anyway) major pitfalls.

1. Placement of the lens is in the upper left corner. I can’t count the number of photos of my finger I have taken because of this.
2. Lag time. The camera seems sluggish when you press the shutter. That could be due to the image stabilizer or the BSS (best shot setting), all of which are designed to give you better pics. But the end result is that I never quite know when the camera is going to take pics.
3. The flash is okay, but again, in an attempt to help me take better pics, it tries too hard to get the light on one thing, which leads to bright middles and darker edges versus the full on brightness I found with the Canon.
4. The Canon SD750 has some amazing movie-taking capabilities. The Nikon is okay with movies, but has no special cool things it can do.
5. The coup de grace for me is the user interface. With the Nikon, you have to hold the camera away from you and pull up the menus on the screen to change ANY settings. Something as simple as turning off the self-timer becomes a bit tricky, especially in outdoor light when it’s hard to see the screen anyway.

So there it is, my gripe list about the Nikon Collpix S50. I’m going to go to Best buy today and take advantage of their return policy and swap the Nikon for the Canon. Call me a stick in the mud, but I just like Canon better.