Nikon Coolpix S500

[ Music ] >> Hi, I'm Will Greenwald assistant editor at CNET.com and this is the Nikon Cool Pix S500 Digital Camera. This is a very small, stylish 7 mega pixel shooter with an attractive stainless steel body and some really nice design points. Now the body's stainless steel though it is quite light. In fact it's one of the lightest we've seen this year. It's also very small. You can easily put it in your pocket and it has this handy little iPod-like click wheel which is really nice for when you're going through the different menus on the camera or if you're looking at your old photos. It has a few interesting features. It has face detection so when you're taking photos of family members, whether it's portraits or at a family gathering or anything like that, you can set it to face detection mode and it will recognize people's faces and adjust focus and exposure accordingly. It also has image stabilization which is pretty handy to have on a camera and it can boost its sensitivity up to ISO 2000. And even though this is an attractive camera you can fit it in your pocket and it has this nice scroll wheel, it doesn't really shoot really well. It performed slowly in our lab tests and the photos we did get were filled with noise and were pretty flawed. Now it looks great and it's great to work with but you're not going to get that great photos out of it. If you just want the camera for the style, consider this. Otherwise, you might want to look at another compact camera. I'm Will Greenwald and this is the Nikon Cool Pix S500. ^M00:01:29 [ Music ]