Introduction and Features
Cigarette packet slim, the S9900 is just about thin enough to slip into a spare pocket. Indeed, at 112 x 66 x 40mm (4.5 x 2.6 x 1.60-in) and 289g (10.2oz), its space-saving design and light weight are ideal for a trip around town or for jetting off to the other side of the world.
Switch it on, however, and the beast within launches out of the front of the camera – a retracting lens with a powerful 30x zoom range, equivalent to 25-750mm. It stretches all the way from generous wide-angle coverage to super-telephoto reach at the flick of the zoom lever, conventionally placed around the shutter button.
Employ Nikon’s ‘Dynamic Fine Zoom’ (digital zoom) extension, and you can double up to a frankly monstrous 1500mm effective focal length.
The combination of svelte build and heavy-duty zoom range isn’t unique. The S9900 is in direct competition with the Canon PowerShot SX710 HS, Panasonic DMC-TZ70 and Sony HX60V, all of which have 30x optical zoom lenses. The Nikon is pricier than the Sony but undercuts both the Canon and Panasonic cameras.
One thing that helps to pack a lens with such long telephoto reach into a small camera is that the image sensor is also small. It’s a 16.0Mp CMOS sensor with a form factor of 1/2.3-inch and a resulting focal length multiplier of 5.6x. The actual focal length of the lens is therefore just 4.5-135mm and the image circle it needs to produce is only small.
It’s not all about the lens, as Nikon has shoehorned a smart range of other fancy features into the S9900. These include built-in Wi-Fi and NFC communication, plus GPS for geotagging images. The GPS system also has the ability to literally pin your photos on a map, which you can view on the 3.0-inch 921k high-res LCD screen, complete with local points of interest. And if you’re still feeling a little lost, there’s a built-in electronic compass as well. The LCD itself boasts full vari-angle movement, but it’s not a touchscreen.
Build Quality and Handling
Despite its small size and light weight, the S9900 feels solid and well engineered. The pocketable nature of the camera benefits from the lack of jutting protuberances like a viewfinder or hot shoe. You can also flip the vari-angle screen over and fold it into the camera, so it doesn’t pick up scratches on its business side. The downside is that, without a built-in or optional external viewfinder, composing images on the screen under a glaring sun can be challenging, despite its non-reflective coating. And the lack of a hot shoe means you’re limited to the tiny built-in pop-up flash, which is quite lacking in power.
Handling benefits from textured areas for the fingers and thumb of your right hand, complete with slight but effective sculpting for an assured grip. To aid stability, you’ll naturally want to bring your left hand into play as well, which isn’t so well catered for. The most obvious hold is to squeeze the left side of the camera between your index finger at the top and your thumb at the bottom. A problem here is that the pop-up flash falls under your finger, and it squashes down when you grip the camera, instead of remaining rigid when it’s retracted.
The only other niggle with handling is that it’s easy to accidentally press the Wi-Fi button with your right thumb when getting ready to take a shot, which diverts the camera onto a mission to find and connect to your smart device (a paired smart phone or tablet that you can use for camera control or sharing pictures). You then have to press the OK button to return to picture-taking mode.
PASM (program, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual) modes are made easily accessible via a shooting mode dial on the top panel, rather than being buried away in a menu system. The dial also gives direct access to a ‘Smart Portrait’ mode with blink-avoidance, and a crafty time-lapse movie mode. Regular movie capture is in the H.264/MPEG-4 format, at resolutions of up to 1080/25p.
A typical range of scene modes is gathered together under the shooting dial’s Scene position, complete with a ‘Scene auto selector’ for ‘intelligent’ real-time scene analysis. There are also several special effects like soft, sepia, high-contrast mono and two ‘toy camera’ options. Overall, there’s a good balance between being able to get to shooting modes and effects quickly and easily, without the controls being too cluttered.
It’s the same story around the back of the camera, where there’s direct access to flash, exposure compensation, self-timer and macro mode, while other shooting parameters like white balance, metering, autofocus and ISO are accessed by a simple and intuitive menu. Navigation would have been easier if the S9900 had a touchscreen but making adjustments is quite quick and painless nevertheless.
Performance and Verdict
A critical area of performance for such a small camera with enormous telephoto reach is image stabilization. After all, there’s little point in being able to travel light with a slimline compact camera if you need to lug a tripod everywhere with you. The good news is that Nikon’s combined optical and electronic VR (Vibration Reduction) system works astonishingly well. We were able to get consistently shake-free shots at an effective 750mm focal length using shutter speeds down to just 1/30th of a second.
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Click here for a full size version.
Click here for a full size version.
While shots might be shake-free, the levels of actual sharpness are somewhat disappointing. Even at the base sensitivity setting of ISO 125, fine detail within scenes turns all too easily to mush in the resulting images. And despite having backlit sensor technology to capture as much light as possible, image quality can be a little noisy even at the base sensitivity setting, and noise levels can get pretty unbearable at medium to high ISO settings.
For night time cityscapes and other low-light pursuits, another option would be to grab a tripod after all and to use a long exposure. Here, though, the S9900 is somewhat hamstrung by its maximum exposure time of just two seconds in ‘Night Landscape: Tripod’ mode and eight seconds in A/S/M shooting modes.
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Dynamic range is merely mediocre and, while highlights tend to be well preserved when using the matrix metering option, shadows can look overly gloomy and lack detail. Unlike with many Nikon cameras, ‘Active D-Lighting’ isn’t on the menu, so there’s no facility for controlling how much highlights are reined in and shadow detail is boosted.
On the plus side, the auto white balance and matrix metering are both very reliable. It’s a good thing too, because the S9900 can only capture stills in JPEG format. You therefore can’t blag it by shooting raw mode and adjusting white balance and other shooting parameters at the editing stage. At least the range of scene modes makes it easier to get the results that you’re after in-camera.
Click here for a full size version.
Click here for a full size version.
Click here for a full size version.
Click here for a full size version.
During playback, there’s also a range of trick ‘Quick effects’, enabling you to save copies of captured images with effects like painting, photo illustration, soft portrait, cross screen and a few more. However, considering the lack of raw capture, we’d have preferred to see the inclusion of Nikon’s ‘Picture Control’ options like standard, vivid and landscape, which are sadly lacking.
The contrast-detection autofocus system is a little sluggish compared with the phase-detection autofocus of a typical DSLR, or the hybrid contrast/phase autofocus system of Nikon 1 compact system cameras. However, it compares fairly well with similarly specced compacts and the S9900 autofocuses accurately throughout its zoom range, with the minimum of hunting back and forth even for tricky targets. That’s no mean feat considering that the lens is quite ‘slow’, having a widest available aperture that shrinks from f/3.7 to f/6.4 as you extend through the zoom range.
We liked
The mighty 30x optical zoom range is backed up by very effective Vibration Reduction stabilization for handheld shooting. The vari-angle screen and built-in GPS are well implemented.
We disliked
There’s no built-in or optional viewfinder, no hot shoe, and no facility for shooting in raw quality mode. Image quality is a little lacking in terms of sharpness, dynamic range and noise. Long exposures are limited to eight seconds.
Verdict
There’s a lot packed into the S9900 but the combination of its slim build and 30x optical zoom range are the key attractions. It results in a camera that’s easy to take anywhere and everywhere, while also offering the kind of versatility that you could only enjoy with a DSLR by carting along two or three lenses, at least one of which would be massive and very heavy.
The difference, of course, is the image quality. The small 1/2.3-inch format image sensor keeps pixel count to a fairly modest 16Mp. It’s interesting to note that the Canon PowerShot SX710 HS boosts resolution from 16Mp to 20Mp compared with its predecessor, practically matching the Sony HX60V. Meanwhile, the new Panasonic DMC-TZ70 reduces its pixel count from 18Mp to 12Mp compared with the preceding DMC-TZ60, so the Nikon S9900 sticks to the middle ground.
Handling is good on the whole, while the controls and menu system strike a good balance between ease, speed and sophistication. Autofocus, metering and auto white balance are accurate and consistent, and the vari-angle screen and GPS are well implemented. The Wi-Fi system works well too, so long as you have a smartphone or tablet that you can pair with the camera.
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