Name: Nikon COOLPIX S60
Category: digital still camera
Price: About JPY40,000
Release date in Japan: September, 2008

It's all about touch these days, from the iPhone and its imitators to new desktop computers boasting touch-panel screens. And now you'll be swiping and poking at the back of your kondeji (compact digital camera), if Nikon has its way.

The COOLPIX S60 is a 145-g flat rectangle of a camera with a 3.5-inch "real wide angle" LCD touch screen on its back that takes over for nearly all controls. (On/off and shutter release remain physical buttons.) As you'd expect, icons appearing on the panel let you access set-up options, photo and movie playback, shooting options like zoom and flash, and so on.

What's more interesting is touch-based interaction not with the camera but with the scene. Just touch your subject on the screen, and the camera will set its exposure and focus on that subject. It's an operation that many users will find far easier than the traditional way of handling off-center subjects with automatic cameras (center on sobject, half-press and hold shutter release, re-frame shot, press shutter release). Another feature: once the built-in face-recognition has a face targeted, a press on the panel's "Portrait One-touch Zoom" icon will zoom in to an optimal full-face portrait size.  

iPhone-like photo playback tricks include photo orientation that rotates with camera orientation, "swiping" to view successive photos, and touch-based closeups (though from a demo video this appears to use one-finger taps, not two-finger "pinching"). There's a new shtick too: you can use the included stylus to draw or write on your photos in multiple colors.

Other specs: 10 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, ISO up to 3200, smile-detection timer, HDMI connector for playback to HiVision TV.

More info: http://www.nikon-coolpix.com/j/s60.html (Japanese)

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