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Though the S700 doesn't offer much in the way of manual controls, at least it doesn't try to hide them from you. In addition to a handful of scene modes, there's a sub-par movie capture option which maxes out at 320x240 30fps video.
I found the S700's buttons small and just a little too flat, making them difficult to push. The four-way nav--for exposure compensation, flash, macro and self timer--had more travel, but was also surprisingly stiff. I frequently had to press multiple times to get a setting to register.
As you'd expect from a camera in this class, image noise eradicates almost all detail by the time you reach ISO 400; everything shot there and above is effectively usuable, with some exceptions based on image content. The noise would be less of a problem if the images were sharper to start with--as you can see from the ISO 100 crop, what little detail is there looks smeared and blurred.
You can see the barrel distortion at the S700's widest angle of 35mm-equivalent, but that's pretty typical for this class of cameras. However, the S700 also displays vignetting--darkening in the corners of the image--which is less common. (I increased the contrast for the inset photo to make the vignetting more easily visible on different displays.)
Although the S700's auto white balance worked reasonably well overall, it occasionally hiccuped. For example, it misread this scene (right), but worked fine when set to the daylight preset (left).
