A very good point and shoot

We bought a Nikon S3 in May 2006 with a 512 Mb Ultra II SanDisk SD card installed. In the past we've had Olympus 4MP and Casio 5MP Exilim digital point and shoots.

My wife and I used the S3 quite a bit over the past 6 months (taking pictures of our kids, neighbors, family, etc). Our primary use was take about 80-100 pictures at 2816x2112 (6MP) each at about 1Mb and then a few quicktime video clips. We would upload the files to a digital photo printing website to generate glossy 4x5, 5x7 and a few 8x10 prints.

Overall we were quite happy with the camera. We like the size, although a side-effect is the buttons are quite small - and potentially very hard for someone with big fingers to use.

In good lighting the picture quality is great even at 8x10 print sizes. Macro mode works well - auto-focus is fast.

We don't use flash much - so we rarely ran out of battery, but we found that images shot without flash in low-light were noisy and had distorted colors compared to other cameras. The various flash modes - including fill flash - do work well, and the auto-red-eye removal tools did their job.

You need to experiment (a lot it seems) with the 'scene' modes to get best results - an example is our little baby girls frequently wave their arms around - unless we are set to 'Sports' mode we get blur from their waving arms. The "multi-16" in sports mode is useful if you are trying to get a good shot of a rapidly changing baby face (it shoots a burst of 16 frames at 1 frame every 1/2 second). Side effect of sports mode is it speeds up the shutter, but again in low light, you can start to notice color distortion. You can't really control the shutter speed directly - only the "ISO" setting ... Nikon also integrated several other 'scene' modes like sunset, fireworks, etc. Other than sports we only used portrait and backlit modes (backlit didn't work well for us - wasn't clear what the camera was metering on).

The quicktime movies turned out well, although I haven't burned them to DVD yet - just watching them on the computer screen. The audio picks up "best" whoever is holding the camera (obviously) ... but it can pick up people talking 10-15 feet away okay. Somehow its more fun to use the S3 than by Sony handicam.

We used the bundled PictureProject software to download from the camera onto our Windows XP system. Only nits with this is it places the various downloads into different folders. It has a 'collections' feature which allows you to organize the photos across downloads - but collections didn't help - it always seemed hard to create and figure out where the files were to upload. The "Edit" function also seems a little scary - its still not clear if "Edits" are to a copy (undo-able) or to the originals. I guess if you want to really modify your photos, use some other photo editing software to do it.

The camera+software panorama feature was easy to use and produced very good results.

It was working great until it dropped onto our hardwood floor. Camera works except can't take pictures (can still see stored images, and the camera is still trying to adjust exposure and AF ... the "image" and taken photos are just black).

So we went and bought an S6 to replace our S3. Skipping a review of the S6's new features like WiFi here ... if I were given the choice now, I would spend the $200 on the S3 (what it is today vs the $299 I paid for it 6 months ago) versus the $269 on the S6.