The Nikon Coolpix S70 is a very well built ultra-compact camera. The elegantly basic front plate features a sliding lens cover and a rubber coating that feels like soft leather to the touch. Like many other, similar cameras, the Nikon Coolpix S70 is powered up by sliding the lens cover downward, a move that exposes the lens, flash and AF assist lamp; and readies the camera for action in less than two seconds. There is no dedicated on/off button – a good design solution, as it would be redundant anyway.

What seems less sensible is that there is no actual Playback button either, meaning that you need to expose the lens even when you do not intend to take pictures, just review what you have already shot. In fact the only physical control other than the sliding cover is the shutter release button, found on the right-hand side of the top plate, exactly where you would want it to be. Everything else, including zoom operation, is done by way of the touch-sensitive screen that occupies the entire rear panel of the camera.

The lens is of the internally stacked variety, which does not extend upon power-up or zooming – this is one of the reasons why the Coolpix S70 takes less time to start up than most other compact cameras. Nikon has made a deliberate effort to shift the lens away from the upper right-hand corner – when viewed front on – in order to reduce the possibility of it getting blocked by a finger. This attempt is only somewhat successful – your middle finger may still intrude into the lens’ field of view if you are not careful enough.

The lens has a focal range of 5-25mm, which translates into a more than usable 28-140mm in 35mm equivalency. Aperture wise it is not particularly fast; its brightness being f/3.9 at the wide end and f/5.8 at full telephoto. Like most small-sensor digicams, the Nikon Coolpix S70 lacks an iris diaphragm. In strong daylight it employs a built-in neutral density filter to avoid overexposure, but this obviously has no effect on depth of field, as the physical size of the aperture does not change.

The Nikon Coolpix S70 is a well-built but controversial little snapper. As a digital compact camera, it is average – it has some nice functions, such as the Touch Shutter feature that lets you focus on your subject and take a picture very quickly; but enthusiast photographers will likely bemoan the limited level of user control over the picture taking process as well the lack of a pre- or post-capture histogram to check exposure.

In use, the S70 can at times prove annoying – we have often found ourselves in the Home menu against our will when we involuntarily touched the omnipresent Home icon in the lower right-hand corner, for instance – and its image quality is only so-so due to sharpness inconsistencies and the negative effect of too high pixel density on dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. As a touchscreen device, it is a step behind the times – yes, it has multi-touch and gesture support, but the execution is a little rough and the experience is less fluid than with a latest-generation Apple iPhone.

The most interesting part of the Nikon S70 is undoubtedly its 3.5-inch OLED screen, which we found provided a very wide viewing angle with no colour shifts or loss of contrast, but it did not prove to be any better than a decent LCD screen when it came to daylight visibility. We were somewhat disappointed at its resolution too; a display of this size should really have at least 460,000 dots instead of just 288,000