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From the outside, the S2500 closely resembles the Nikon S3100, a camera with the unfortunate claim to having the worst image quality we’ve seen in a long time. The S2500 costs less but its photos are significantly better. Such are the realities of modern compact digital cameras, whereby the S3100’s excessively high 14-megapixel resolution adds more noise than detail compared to the S2500’s 12-megapixel sensor.
The S2500’s body is made from plastic but it looks uncannily like metal, and its subtle curves look smart and help with rigidity. It’s not so easy on the ear, though. The beep that accompanies button presses is at a fixed, aggressively shrill volume. The only option was to disable it, but that also muted the audible confirmation for successful autofocus – something that we’d prefer to leave on.
The controls are typical point-and-shoot fare, with buttons for flash, macro, self-timer and exposure compensation, plus ISO speed, white balance, continuous mode and autofocus area available in the menu. The ability to move the autofocus point to anywhere in the frame is a welcome surprise, and it’s quick to adjust once this mode has been selected in the menu. It’s a reasonably nippy camera in general use, too, taking 2.5 seconds to switch on and shoot, and 1.9 seconds between shots. Continuous shooting was at a passable 0.9fps.
Image quality was a vast improvement on the S3100, but that’s not saying much. Noise was still a big problem in low light, and although aggressive noise reduction disguised the worst of it, shadows looked grainy and there were blotchy discolorations in brighter areas of frames. Automatic settings were well chosen to cope with indoor ambient sunlight, but shooting under dim artificial lighting without the flash resulted in long shutter speeds and blurry shots. Videos offered little to get excited about, either, with a basic VGA resolution and soundtracks that were blighted by a constant hiss and the chatter of the autofocus motor.
Shadows appeared slightly grainy and we notices some blotchy discoloration in brighter parts of the frame
There’s nothing much wrong with this little camera, but even at this low price its photo and video quality are below par. We prefer the similarly-priced Panasonic Lumix DMC-S3
