Not surprisingly, because of the small size of the camera, all controls are on the small size, yet we had no difficulty using them. All of the controls for the Nikon S600 are on the back and/or top of the camera. The top, shown in Figure 5, has (from left to right) the power on/off button, an on/off indicator light, and a large rectangular shutter release button. The five holes on the far left are for the speaker. The three holes near the on/off button are for the built-in microphone. Although the on/off switch is slightly recessed, there is a possibility that it could be inadvertently activated.

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Figure 5: The top of the camera.

The back of the camera, shown in Figure 6, has all the other camera controls. The zoom control is at the top. Under that is the flash indicator. A small area is left for your thumb when holding the camera. The five dots next to that area mark the flap for the USB connection which is actually on the side of the camera.

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Figure 6: The back controls.

Under that area is the MODE button and a playback button marked with an arrow. Under that is a useful scroll wheel that can be used for making selections on the screen. The on-screen menu is activated by pressing the MENU button below the scroll wheel. To the right of the MENU button is the Delete button.

The scroll wheel can be pressed at the top, bottom, left, and/or right to quickly access four of the most-used camera functions. The flash is to the top, the macro function to the bottom, the self-timer to the left, and exposure compensation to the right. Each of these is marked by a white icon indicating their use. However, the exposure icon didn’t fit on the back of the camera, so it wound up on the right side. In any case, this is an intuitive way to make some of the main functionality of the camera easy to access, a feature that we highly praise.

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Figure 7: The bottom of the camera.

The bottom of the camera, shown in Figure 7, has a hard plastic tripod socket and the battery/SD card compartment. Both of the tripods that we tried allowed the compartment to be opened while the camera was attached to the tripod.