The Nikon COOLPIX S6900 Is Undoubtedly Made For Selfies
The selfie generation isn't going away any time soon, especially when you have major camera makers catering to them. Nikon's latest digital compact, the COOLPIX 6900, is one of those. Though designed with ease of use in mind, quite a number of its features are both implicitly and explicitly targeted at the ever growing use case of self-portraits.
The COOLPIX S6900, with its 3-inch 460k-dot LCD screen, is the direct successor of the COOLPIX S6600, which Nikon bills as the first in its COOLPIX S series to get a vari-angle LCD monitor. Back in 2013, it meant the ability to take difficult shots. This year though, it means only one thing: selfies. But if that wasn't enough to convince you, the shutter release button that adorns the front of the camera might. Want more proof? How about the Gesture Control operation that lets you trigger the shutter without having to touching any button and which automatically switches the camera to a wide-angle shot for a self-portrait?
To be fair, the S6900 can function as a decent regular digital camera as well. It has an effective pixel count of 16 megapixels, backed by a Backside Illuminated (BSI) CMOS sensor. Its NIKKOR lens can cover a range of 25mm to 300mm, while the 24x Dynamic Fine Zoom, in addition to the 12x Optical Zoom, lets it support a very short close up of 2cm for macro photography. The camera is equipped with both NFC, for easy pairing with NFC-enabled smartphones, and WiFi for transferring over photos and videos. It is capable of recording Full HD video at 60i, complete with stereo sound, with a single press of a button.
It has a few other software tricks in its arsenal, which may again sound like catering to the selfie crowd. Glamour Mode lets you preview effects that enhance human faces, like Skin Softening and Powder, right from the monitor even while or before taking a shot. And Self-Collage puts a photobooth in the digital camera, letting you take multiple self-portraits in rapid, timed succession and then creating a collage, what else, of those selfies.
Nikon has not yet announced any availability details for the COOLPIX S6900. Though Photokina is just around the corner, so those might be forthcoming.
