The S602 Zoom's long list of features begins with its 6X zoom lens, which opens to an adequate f/2.8 and covers a range from 35mm to 210mm in 35mm film format terms. The extensive exposure control system includes all five exposure modes (fully automatic, programmed automatic, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, manual), three metering methods, autoexposure bracketing, and four scene modes. You can adjust in-camera sharpening but not contrast and color saturation, the most important omissions from the feature set.

The S602 Zoom's autofocus system includes a special AF Area mode that lets you move the AF target almost anywhere within the frame--handy for off-center compositions. The manual-focus system relies on a servo-controlled manual focus ring and helps you judge focus by magnifying the center portion of the scene in the camera's LCD or electronic viewfinder. This works adequately well on the S602 Zoom, but some other such systems we've seen are somewhat quicker and clearer to use.

The camera saves still images as JPEGs (at three compression levels) or uncompressed TIFFs. However, its video capabilities are much more unusual. It can capture 30-frame-per-second M-JPEG video with sound at either 640x480 or 320x240 resolution for as long as the capacity of your storage card allows. You can't zoom or focus while shooting video, the sound is monaural, and the quality of the footage is clearly worse than a digital video camcorder's, but the S602 Zoom's video-capture features clearly surpass those of other still cameras we've seen.

Improving upon its predecessor, the S602 Zoom lets you store images and video on CompactFlash cards and IBM Microdrives in addition to lower-capacity SmartMedia cards. In continuous shooting mode, the camera fires off five shots in 1 second before pausing for about 10 seconds to write the images to the card. A variation on this mode captures up to 25 frames at 5fps, holding them in the buffer and saving only the last five frames. In theory, you could use this to capture up to 5 seconds of action and, by stopping the sequence at the right time, ensure that the five frames of the most important action are saved. There's also a 1-megapixel continuous shooting mode that captures as many as 40 shots in one burst, as well as a multiple-exposure mode.