Others say...

"be careful of getting a used/defective product"
I have bought electronic products from Amazon and it seems I end up getting a defective products. The Nikon coolpix is a great camera but have it checked completely as the display screen was grainy and fuzzy. There was also clicking sounds. I had to return the product and get a replacement. So far it seems ok. We will see how it goes.

"Great little camera!"
This is the second Nikon Coolpix S550 we have purchased. The camera is perfect for my teenage daughters. We purchased our first camera in May 2008 when it first came out. We were very happy with the size, picture quality, videos etc. and knew exactly the camera we wanted for our older daughter for Xmas. Our family vacationed at Disney and the nightshots this little camera took were awesome - better than my digital SLR!!! Everyone in our group was quite impressed. Now, the 2 things my daughters do not leave the house without - their cell phone and their camera. Both are small and can slip into their pocket. There may be digital cameras that have better picture quality or more options, but for the money and for what we use the camera for, this is perfect for us! We absolutely love this camera!!

"nikon coolpix"
The product is good from usability but Windows 2000 users have to be careful about transferring photos onto PC. I had to buy a Card Reader to do that. The installation CD was not very helpful in locating the reqd driver for the device.

"Nikon coolpix s550"
A great camera a very good price my wife loves it.For my money I do not think you can find a better camer.

"Does its job pretty well"
This tiny camera does exactly what I want it to do: take decent pictures and take up less space than my Nikon D40, which is just too bulky to carry around all the time.

After taking about 100 photos with the S550 under a variety of lighting conditions, here are my impressions:

The plusses:
- Auto white balance is smart, even under incandescent lights, so you get pretty accurate colors. You don't get the ugly orange hue that many cameras (including the D40) produce when used in this lighting in the AutoWB setting.

- I like that it shows the shutter speed by default after focusing, without showing any other distracting icons or information. You don't get surprised by blurry shots, and the camera does seem to try to avoid excessively slow shutter speeds.

- Pictures do look quite good at reasonable image sizes (6x8, or 8x10).

- Panorama mode is a cool idea, but I haven't tried out the image splicing software yet.

Minuses:

- Noise (graininess) is visible at most ISO values. Despite the 10MP rating you can not make 20 inch prints from this camera that look good up close. Big prints will only look good for photos taken in bright outdoor light --- even using the flash indoors probably won't be enough. Personally, I don't care, I even dial down to 3MP or 5MP to reduce the noise a little. (Note that this is not a Nikon S550 problem, it is a small CCD sensor problem, so it will be the same on any other camera with an equally small sensor)

- This camera seems to inherit its older brother (D40)'s tendency to over-expose. Not a big deal, since the exposure compensation is easy to dial-in.

- No info screen on playback: as far as I can tell you can't view most of the shooting settings on pictures you have taken (it saves them in the EXIF data, so you can view them in your computer, just not in the camera). I was annoyed by this at first, but I guess it doesn't really matter since there aren't any manual controls for you to play with to optimize things.

- eVR is not real VR. I am skeptical about how well this will work, but actually I haven't had any blurry photos with this camera yet to try eVR out on. This is how it should be, though. The short focal lengths of these cameras should make it really hard to have much blur unless you want it, so I wonder whether VR is really necessary on cameras like this.

Overall, I am quite happy with this camera. If this were my only camera, I would probably rather have a bigger CCD sensor to try to cut down on that noise and take better low-light photos. But bigger sensors need bigger lenses, which only fit in bigger cameras: you can't have everything. If you want a good tiny camera, given the constraints imposed by being tiny, this is a great choice.