The Nikon Coolpix S9500 ($349.95 direct) is a pocket-size digital camera that manages to squeeze an 18-megapixel image sensor, a GPS radio, Wi-Fi, and a long 22x lens into a slim form factor. It's a stylish design that can snap sharp photos in automatic mode, but it doesn't offer the level of manual control that some others in this class do. If you don't like to fiddle with settings it's a solid option, but we like the 20x-zoom Canon PowerShot SX280 HS, a bit more. It's our Editors' Choice compact superzoom since it offers many of the same features, is a bit less expensive, and also gives you access to shutter and aperture settings.
Design and Features
The S9500, available in black, red, or silver, is impressively small, especially when you consider that its lens is a 25-500mm (35mm equivalent) f/3.4-6.3 design. It measures 2.4 by 4.4 by 1.3 inches (HWD) and weighs in at 7.3 ounces. It's not out of line for this class of camera, but it's tiny compared with the always-connected, 21x Samsung Galaxy Camera, an Android-powered beast that packs a huge touch screen; it comes in at 2.8 by 5.1 by 0.75 inches and weighs 11 ounces. One quibble about the S9500's design is the placement of the tripod socket; it's located at the edge of the base of the camera, not centered under the lens as you'd expect. This isn't a camera that you'll likely use frequently with a tripod, however.
You get a good number of physical controls, even though shooting modes are limited. There's a mode dial on top, along with the shutter release, zoom rocker, and Power button. The rear panel houses a control dial with push-button directions to set the flash output, exposure compensation, macro focusing mode, and the self-timer. There's also a Record button to start and stop videos, a Menu button, and image playback controls.
The mode dial gives you access to a number of scene modes and image effects. By default, the camera operates in Auto mode. There's a setting to automatically select a scene mode, and also one for manual scene selection; this is accomplished via the menu. Nikon opted to include a few scene modes separately on the dial: Night Landscape, Night Portrait, Backlighting, and Smart Portrait.
The standard program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual modes are not included, as they are on the SX280 HS. Depending on your level of photographic expertise, this may or may not bother you; I was attempting to capture a shot with a lot of motion on the street one morning and the camera defaulted to a very low ISO with a 1/40-second shutter speed, resulting in a shot with considerable motion blur. Activating the Sports scene mode would have fixed that, but I would have missed my shot by the time I dove into the menu system to change to that setting. A simple shutter speed control and shutter priority mode on the dial is quicker to access, and would have resulted in a useable photograph.
There's also an Effects mode, which lets you apply artistic filters to your images. These include soft focus, sepia toning, selective color, and a few others. It's not as extensive a library as the Quick Effects that are enabled by default; with these turned on you are prompted to add an art filter to your images after every shot. The filters available through this menu are much more extensive—there are more than 20. You can dismiss this screen by tapping the shutter button. Quick effects can be applied via the playback menu, but only if that feature was enabled when the photo was captured. I found the menu to be a bit of an annoyance, and it's unfortunate that it's not possible to disable the prompt, or to apply the effect to images without having it enabled during capture.
The 3-inch rear display uses OLED technology, and packs a 614k-dot resolution. It's noticeably sharper than the 460k-dot displays found on the Canon SX280 HS and the Samsung WB800F, and there are five brightness settings so you can increase its luminance on sunny days.
Wi-Fi and GPS are integrated, which is fairly common for cameras of this class. GPS automatically adds your geographic location to your photos. And Wi-Fi allows you to transfer images to your iOS or Android device using the free Nikon Wireless Mobile Utility app. The camera acts as a wireless hotspot; you just need to connect to it with your phone to transfer images. Your device can also be used as a remote control for the camera using the app. You'll get a Live View feed on its screen and there are controls available to adjust the zoom and fire the shutter.
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