I love the Nikon Coolpix models in this style and have bought a few of the earlier models. I have found all of them to be reliable and produce superb quality photos. The S710 is really an elegant piece of work, beautifully made and stylish.
Like other Coolpixes it has one feature that I believe is exclusive to Nikon, the Best Shot Selector. This is primarily useful in low light situations where the camera's shutter speed will be quite slow. The way it works is this: when BSS is turned on, you can hold the shutter release down and the camera will take up to 10 successive shots, and save only the sharpest one. Since hand-held slow-shutter shots always vary a good deal in sharpness from shot to shot, this feature, discarding all but the sharpest picture, serves as sort of a "poor man's image stabilization." This can be combined with the camera's VR (which is actual, optical image stabilization), the two working together to produce remarkably sharp photos in low light without the use of flash. Since all ultracompact cameras like this S710 have relatively weak built-in flash units, this is a most useful feature.
Another feature of the S710 that attracted me to it, and that my previous S-series Coolpixes don't have, is that like the much larger and more "serious" digital SLRs, it allows the user to set the camera in Program, Shutter priority, Aperture priority or full Manual mode. This will probably not mean much if anything to people who aren't really into photography, but for those of us who are used to having these controls on our SLRs and DSLRs it is a much appreciated feature. Along with these modes of course are the usual Coolpix scene modes, 16 of them -- Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Panorama, etc., etc. -- and also a Scene Auto Selector setting in which the camera will attempt to choose the scene mode best suited for the existing conditions and subject.
The lens is a sharp seven-element zoom with a range of 28mm wide angle (in 35mm camera equivalence) to 101mm short telephoto (equiv.) Maximum aperture is f/2.8 at the short end and f/5.6 at the long end. VR (stabilization) is optical, by the lens-shift method. In my opinion it would be very hard to improve on this lens for this type of camera.
Drawbacks? Nothing very serious. The buttons and rotary selector on the right side are somewhat cramped because of that big 3" LCD monitor, and for the same reason there's no optical viewfinder. This can be a slight problem in bright sunlight, but probably most users will be willing to give that up for the pleasure of the big monitor in a very small camera. Optical viewfinders in cameras of this type are never accurate anyway, while the LCD monitor is by nature perfectly accurate or extremely close to it.
Now frankly, I am dubious about putting 14.5 megapixels in such a small camera, primarily because cramming that many pixels into the little sensor means that each pixel is very tiny and therefore requires a good deal of amplification, and the result is increased electronic "noise" at anything much above the lowest ISO (sensitivity, equivalent to film speed in a film camera) setting. Unfortunately we are seeing this silly megapixel race in all brands of small cameras. The good news is that you can set the camera to a lower and more sensible resolution. I generally use mine at 5 megapixels and never at more than 8 Mp. These are the highest resolutions I am ever likely to need or want with this type of camera. Using higher resolutions only means getting fewer images on the SD card, slowing down the camera's image processing, taking up more space on the hard drive when the images are transferred to the computer, etc. -- all for no real benefit that I can see, and I have compared highly magnified images at various resolutions.
At the camera's Auto setting it will self-adjust the sensitivity to anywhere between ISO 100 and 1600, depending on the existing light, and favoring the ISO 100 end which is noise-free. The maximum ISO when set manually is a whopping 12,800. This means you take take pictures in very low light without flash, especially when using the camera's VR (which is turned on by default), though at this high ISO the image contains a great deal of noise -- even though the camera automatically reduces resolution to 3 megapixels at ISO 6400 and 12,800. It is fun to play with and can be useful in many situations where you can't or just don't want to use flash -- just be prepared for very grainy pictures. Most casual snapshooters will probably never use this feature.
Summing up: this is a terrific little camera for the enthusiast. It is really a lot more camera than the typical snapshooter needs, and it is just astonishing how Nikon has been able to pack all these features (I've only touched on a few of the most important ones) into such a slick, pocketable camera. I am sort of a collector-user, and have at least a couple of dozen compact and ultracompact digital cameras in addition to a half dozen DSLRs. Of the ultracompacts, this S710 is easily my favorite.
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