Nikon Coolpix S9500 First Impressions Review

Our First Take

The Nikon S9500 is a slim, compact camera with plenty of resolution and a long 22x optical zoom lens.

The S9500 is designed to put the power of a bridge camera in your jeans pocket, along with WiFi, GPS, and full HD video recording. And it’ll do it at a competitive $350 price point. While we feel midrange compact cameras are generally a bit overpriced for what they offer, the S9500 seems like it might provide enough value for your dollar to get you to drop the smartphone. Can it succeed in this mission? We’ve gone hands-on at CP+ 2013 to find out.

Design & Usability

A simple, solid design that gets all the basics right

The S9500 is designed to fit into your pocket or a small bag—a diminutive companion for when you are traveling or just out doing everyday things. Despite this size constraint, the S9500 manages to squeeze in a 22x optical zoom, about half of what the current crop of high-end superzooms will give you.

The body is made of plastic with a textured coating. A rubber patch on the back is paired with a firm vertical protrusion on the front, giving you a reasonable amount of grip. The camera also manages to fit a physical mode dial on the top plate, along with a control dial–directional pad on the back. This control combination isn’t the best we’ve ever seen, but it’s more than enough to allow you to wield the camera easily and with confidence.

We were more impressed with the curvature of Fujifilm’s F900EXR, which provides similar zoom range and body size, but we can see the Nikon S9500 winning over its fair share of fans. What really stands out about the S9500 is its 640k-dot OLED screen, which is sharp enough to show off fine details and crisp menu text.

Advanced or enthusiast photographers aren’t likely to take much of a shine to the S9500. The camera lacks both manual control and RAW shooting capability, leaving users with a mostly automatic shooting experience. There are plenty of creative options—scene modes while shooting and editing choices during playback—but hardly the kind of fine control that power users crave.

That said, the S9500 is remarkably easy to use. The menu system is simple to navigate, similar in style to the Nikon 1 series or higher-end Coolpix cameras from the last year. Switching between specific effects or scene modes can be a bit tiresome, but in general the S9500’s operation feels snappy and responsive. We were also impressed by the camera’s autofocus speed. Nikon hasn’t made a big deal out of it (unlike Fuji, who made it the main selling point of their similar F900EXR), but the S9500’s AF system locked onto subjects quickly, even when zoomed all the way in—provided they offered a high degree of contrast.

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Features

Plenty of extras to lure you away from competing travel-zooms

The S9500 includes both WiFi and GPS, though these are merely complementary features and not worth a purchase on their merits alone. The GPS interface lacks the top-down map view that we liked on the new waterproof Nikon AW110, while the wireless functionality isn’t nearly as slick or simple to operate as the sharing features on your smartphone or tablet. There are plenty of wireless options, but entering SSIDs and passwords on the onscreen menu gets old in a hurry.

The S9500 did pique our interest with a variety of high-speed continuous shooting modes, particularly given how well Nikon has put speed to use in its 1-series mirrorless cameras. Unfortunately, the S9500 doesn’t reach those heights; the camera is capable of just 7.5 fps when shooting at full resolution. While that isn’t slow by any stretch, the buffer lasts a mere five shots before filling up. Many similarly-priced cameras are capable of 10fps for 10 shots or more, so the S9500 fails to impress here.

You can also choose from high-speed continuous shooting modes of 60 fps and 120 fps, and there are high-speed video options of 120 fps and 240 fps. Unfortunately, all of these are at drastically reduced resolution. The Olympus XZ-10, which we also previewed here at CP+, is capable of 720p capture at 120fps, while the S9500 can only shoot VGA (640×480px) videos at that speed. The S9500 does offer standard 1080/30p full HD video, however, if speed isn’t your thing.

Really, once you get past the impressive 22x optical zoom range, the S9500 looks rather pedestrian on paper. The lens has a maximum aperture range of f/3.4-6.3, with the only aperture control coming in the form of an in-camera ND filter that can drop exposure by 2EV. The shutter speed range is limited to just 1–1/1500sec, with a longer 4-second exposure available only in the fireworks mode. Even the ISO is rather limited by contemporary standards at 125–1600, with an extended 3200 option also available.

Conclusion

The S9500 is fundamentally sound, but its extra features fall flat.

The S9500 is a pocketable, easy-to-handle travel zoom camera with a 22x optical zoom and what looks to be a solid 18.1-megapixel BSI CMOS image sensor. At an MSRP of $349.95, the S9500 is not cheap, but it offers a number of features to try and tip the scales in its favor. WiFi, GPS, high-speed continuous shooting, and even high-speed video modes all are present, but unfortunately their execution doesn’t improve the S9500’s prospects as much as Nikon may have hoped.

In all the basic categories, however, the S9500 earns strong marks. Its menu system is simple and easy to navigate, the camera focuses quickly and accurately, and the zoom range provides useful angles of view at both ends. We were most impressed with the camera’s macro mode and general responsiveness, as it seemed a step quicker than most of its competition. We wish the S9500 offered more manual control, or at least greater exposure flexibility, but the simple, snappy operation should appeal to plenty of users nonetheless.

If you’re in the market for a travel-zoom camera that covers the basics and fits in your pocket, the S9500 seems like it might be a good choice. The extras are just icing, but they’re enough to set the camera above much of a very crowded market. Is that worth the price? We’ll have to get a final word on image quality before we can say for sure, but the S9500 shows plenty of promise.