Also worth mentioning is the camera's pop-up flash, which is well designed and doesn't feel as if it'll snap off despite being made out of plastic. It pops up, wedgelike, out of the frame once you slide a toggle on the side of the camera. In our tests, it was one of the best point-and-shoot flashes we've seen in terms of evenly lighting a scene.

In addition to two well-performing Auto modes--a regular auto mode, and a scene-based auto mode that chooses the applicable scene preset depending on the environment--the Nikon Coolpix S9100 offers 14 scene modes. Among them are old standbys such as Portrait, Sports, Beach, Snow, and Sunset, as well as more unusual selections that include Dusk/Dawn, Food, and Museum modes.

The camera also provides an Easy Panorama mode, which is similar to the setting found on Sony's cameras: You press the shutter button and pan across a scene, and the camera then stitches together a panoramic image. The S9100, however, goes a few steps further than Sony's cameras, giving you the option to create either 180-degree or 360-degree panoramas via the menus. In general, the mode works well, just as long as you pan the camera slowly; quick pans led to blurry images in my test shots.

You can reach all the aforementioned modes by selecting 'Scene' on the camera's mode dial and making your choice via on-screen menus, but the S9100 also provides quick access to a few modes--Backlighting, Night Portrait, and Night Landscape modes, as well as the camera's continuous shooting mode--directly on the mode dial. The camera captures at a rate of 9.5 shots per second at full resolution, but you're limited to 5 shots per burst. It fires the shutter so quickly that getting the hang of it is a bit tricky, and it works best when a fast-moving subject is already in motion.