Service:
The controls are all easily accessible and more or less vereilt useful at the back of the camera. Annoying are the menu system and the accessibility of the settings: In many modes options are either "grayed out" and can not be selected (at best) or not discoverable. Love Manufacturer: Nothing against scenes programs, who wants to have it, fair enough, but please, let me just go on! For a camera in this price range, I wish (if not a fully manual mode already is) but at least a reasonable Programmed AE, when I manually at all may fiddle around what I want. Sure, you can find workarounds for each situtation - annoying it is anyway.
Image Quality:
That necessarily the standards of SLR may not be applied in an ultra compact superzoom camera, probably should be clear. Any scale you need but, so I compare the S9100 with pictures of P7000 - naturally this plays again in a different league, but I wanted to see how it brought in close to the Nikon-house "compact" flagship. However, my expectations were not particularly high here: 18x zoom in a confined space and 12 MP on the small sensor sounded like a bad idea. For this I was however pleasantly surprised. In good light, the images over the entire focal length range for small prints (10x15) are reasonably sharp and sufficient, but softer across the board than the P7000. As soon as the light poor and the ISO is higher, breaking the quality rapidly, but that's all compact way.
Other:
The built-in image editing features are nice, but are not used by me, as well as the panorama function - but the latter is beautifully simple and enough for a quick shot without high quality requirements from. The image stabilizer works relatively well and is especially for telephoto absolutely necessary: In the small aperture of the lens, the sensor size limited only in the lower areas of noise-free ISO and one equivalent of up to 450mm focal length one is grateful for every opportunity to prevent camera shake.
At this point, an important note: In many other reviews here often have the problem of poor-focusing has been addressed. What many users apparently forgotten: at full zoom, the minimum focusing distance is (you have here Not a highly complex telephoto macro for several thousand euros) correspondingly large, to my mind about 80-90 cm. That's not a problem of the camera, but physics.
Conclusion:
The S9100 is an ambitious attempt which was successful in many ways. We have here a camera with a huge zoom range, in a small package that you can always carry around. In good conditions the image quality for the class is okay, at worse conditions still better than no picture and thus certainly adequate for a variety of users. Who it solely on image quality matters but should look elsewhere and must take correspondingly less flexibility and a higher price. The good impression of the S9100, however, marred by the massive unappealing menu and the almost complete lack of manual settings. Overall, I come - depending on demand for the camera and experience of the user - thus on 3-4 stars, for me personally. 3
