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.
