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Just how fast is the Nikon subcompact Coolpix S600? According to the company's magazine ad featuring Ashton Kutcher, one of Hollywood's slick young actors, the S600 is the "fastest starting camera of its kind." (Mr. Kutcher can also be seen snapping away with a Nikon at www.ashtonscoolpix.com, along with Nikon's claims that the $300, 10-megapixel S600 takes "0.7 seconds from start-up to shoot.")
Of course there's fine print (aha!) below the claim warning that the S600's speed dominance is only "among compact digital cameras with 28mm zoom lens and optical vibration reduction as of 1/29/08." (The image at right is a digital version of one of Nikon's official print ad featuring Mr. Kutcher and the CoolPix S600 and S550 cameras. Click on the image to see a larger version of the ad which includes the disclaimer. We circled it in red so you can spot the fine print. If you have Adobe Acrobat software installed, you can also see the full-size ad on Nikon's online press center.)
Seeing those restrictions in fine print made us ask: Are Nikon and Kutcher messin' with our heads, like the actor does to his victims on the Candid Camera-style MTV show Punk'd. Or are he and the camera company on the level?
There was only one way to find out for sure. We bought an S600 and handed it to the engineers in our camera lab. They set out to measure "startup time" as how long it takes for a live-view preview to appear on the LCD after the power is turned on.
Here's how they did the test: They set a software stop watch ticking away on a computer monitor and a camcorder nearby to continuously record the time on the watch. Then they pointed the S600's LCD toward the camcorder and powered it up when the stopwatch read exactly five seconds. (Click on image below, right.)
After a live-view preview appeared on the LCD, they stopped the camcorder. Reviewing the video frame by frame, they located the one when the LCD went live with the corresponding time.
It was exactly 0.7 seconds after the power had been turned on. Score one for Nikon.
Is this really faster than other comparable cameras, as Nikon claims? We couldn't test every other comparable model, but we did check the startup time of two non-Nikon models in the same class (as per that Nikon fine print, both had a 28mm equivalent zoom lens and optical stabilizer, though those factors have no noticeable effect on startup time).
One took 1.5 seconds, the other 1.6—both a bit longer than the S600. Score another for Nikon—sort of, since we didn't actually test every competing model (we know of at least one other comparable camera introduced after Nikon's cutoff date of 1/29/08).
For good measure, we also tested the S600's first-shot and next-shot delay, which were 0.4 and 2 seconds, respectively. Both would rate Very Good in our standard point-and-shoot digital camera Ratings (available only to subscribers).
The bottom line: We didn't get "punk'd" by Kutcher and Nikon.
—Terry Sullivan
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