Alright ya’ll, I’m an absolute sucker for digicams. They take “bad” photos but just deliver such an incredibly fun and nostalgic experience.
In any case, I won’t bore you ranting about how much I love these vintage little cameras. I had played around with the Nikon S3100 for a few weeks, I’ll be sharing a good few sample photos and sharing my impressions. Let’s jump in.
Size/Build
The compact size & weight of a digicam is definitely one of its biggest strengths for me, and this little Nikon is no exception. In typical digicam fashion, it’s compact and ridiculously light. I’d say it’s about 60% smaller than my phone and easily fits in the pocket of whatever I happen to be wearing.
Build quality is fine. It would definitely explode if dropped (unlike a phone), but it feels decent and fairly high quality in the hand. On my particular camera, the battery door was broken (probably why it was so cheap lol), so I just threw a piece of tape over it.
Aesthetically, well, it’s a digicam. It’s cute and shiny and I adore it. I couldn’t care less about the TikTok hype but I do love how it looks.
Usability
Day to day usability is pretty good. It boots up fairly quickly, probably just about as long as it takes you to hit your phone’s camera shortcut. There is a bit of shutter lag, and I found that I’d usually have to hold the camera still for about a half second after it “shoots”.
Image stabilization works really nicely and comes in clutch when you’re zoomed into the max. Speaking of zoom, the camera has 5x optical zoom and it works well/smoothly.
Buttons, the menu, and image playback are all fairly responsive and quick. As is the case with most digicams, pressing a button or taking a picture has cutesy sound effects (you can turn these off, don’t worry).
Images/Video
Now, as far as image quality goes, this thing isn’t going to even out-do your phone. However, the 14mp sensor puts out decent images (in good light) and definitely hits that “vintage” aesthetic a lot of people are going for.
Pictures during the day can be a bit soft/bloomy depending on the lighting, and the dynamic range is absolute crap. I found focus can be fairly hit or miss (especially in less-than-perfect-lighting) and the 720p video looks about as good as you’d expect.
Night photos are honestly not too bad. High ISO is definitely grainy but like…that’s not really a problem and it just adds to the vibe.
Conclusion
But hey, you’re not buying one of these cute old cameras for clinically good image quality, you’re buying them because they’re cute and they offer a nice nostalgic aesthetic.
It’s not my favorite digicam I’ve tried (that goes to the Canon Powershot 160), but for the price I find this one is responsive and feels good enough. If you want to pick it up yourself, I’ll drop an eBay link below (don’t try to buy this new on Amazon). Thanks for reading!
Check prices <— this is an affiliate link, which means I get a (very) tiny commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!