Chris: Hi, I'm Chris.

Amanda: And I'm Amanda. And we're here in the Crutchfield studio today to give you a quick look at Nikon's Coolpix S210 and S550. We've got the S210 in plum and black, and the S550 in blue. And both models are actually available in all three of these colors.

Chris: It's nice to have that choice. These cameras are super small and lightweight. In fact, the S210 is Nikon's smallest camera to date — thinnest. They take really great pictures and video. In fact, I took these cameras home last night and let my daughters try them out. And straight out of the box, without even looking at the manual, they were able to work all the functions and take music videos. They took hundreds of pictures and just had a blast. So — very easy to use.

Amanda: That sounds like a lot of fun.

Chris: Yeah, and they took some really nice shots.

Amanda: Cool. Very cool. Another cool thing about these cameras that you don't see in lots of point-and-shoots is something called D-lighting. It's actually a feature that Nikon offers. And we'll show you what that does. So, just a few minutes ago, we went upstairs and took a picture of Chris. This is a common situation with lots of photos. The background is really bright, but the foreground, the person you want to see then is underexposed, kind of dark. You can't see details of their faces. So you can deal with this in-camera. Just push a button, and it evens out the exposure. It properly exposes Chris — you can see the details in her face and her expression. The background isn't blown out. It just looks natural. It's really, really easy to do.

Chris: Right, it's a really nice feature for any picture that you take that you might not otherwise have gotten to keep because you couldn't see the person very well.

Amanda: Exactly.

Chris: So the differences between the S210 and the S550 are that the S210 has eight megapixels and 3X optical zoom, while the S550 has ten megapixels and 5X optical zoom. So you can zero in a little bit closer on your subjects and get a little higher resolution in your prints.

Amanda: Be able to crop in on those pictures if you want to.

Chris: Exactly.

Amanda: Something else that you get with the 550 that you don't see with the 210 is something called blink alert. And that's exactly what it sounds like. Basically, if someone in your picture blinks, the camera tells you, "Hey, someone blinked. Try again. Might want to do another picture" — which is very handy. Also, smile shutter. This was cool. We tried this out yesterday. Basically, what you do is you get your person framed up in the shot, and as soon as they start to crack a grin, it goes ahead and snaps a picture, so you get that smile right at the right time. Now this is really handy with, I guess, people who don't want to smile in pictures very much.

Chris: Or babies — when you're trying to capture that first grin.

Amanda: Yeah, toddlers who don't know, "Smile in a picture because it's cute."

Chris: Right — don't know what "say cheese" means.

Amanda: Exactly.

Chris: So there you have it, the Nikon Coolpix S210 and S550 digital cameras.