Nikon Coolpix S4150 review

The overall quality of the images is good - they're sharp and crisp with a good balance of well represented colours. Whilst the auto mode fares well the majority of the time, it has its limitations and occasionally overexposes images, especially those taken in bright sunlight.

Smart portrait mode is supposed to take a photo when your subject is smiling, but during our test it was unresponsive and became frustrating for both subject and photographer as we waited for it to decide if we were smiling wide enough. Blink mode, on the other hand, worked well - preventing photos from being taken when a blink was detected.

The images you see on the LCD occasionally differ to the images you see once downloaded, especially those images taken at high ISO settings. On the screen they appear blurry, out of focus and unusable - but once downloaded some are salvageable.

Although it can shoot up to ISO 3200 it's worth noting that at the higher end of the spectrum photos suffer badly from a loss of colour and image definition, even whilst shooting in daylight, and during low light or darkness the camera is unable to take reasonable shots that are in focus without the use of the flash or a tripod.

Chromatic aberration is limited and fairly well controlled, although sometimes visible when zoomed to full capacity.

If you look at the sample images at 100%, you will see a couple of examples where the in-camera sharpening has produced some less than pleasing results. There's loss of picture quality surrounding the faces of the people in the shot, giving them an almost halo like appearance. However, given that it's unlikely that most people will blow up the images to this size, it's not likely to be a big issue for the average user.