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Nikon Coolpix 600Nov 28 '99 Write an essay on this topic.I purchased a Nikon Coolpix 600 prior to a nine month business trip to England with the hopes of keeping my family up to date with our travels. The camera has proven to be a wonderful addition to our travel kit and friends and family alike are always asking when the next set of pictures will be on the web. At the time of purchase (Jan99) my decision was between the Coolpix 600 and the Canon A5. Being a frequent traveler, I value small scale and both of these units (the 600 and the A5) fit the bill for pocket storage quite well. I must admit the fact that the Coolpix was on sale at the store for $150 CDN less than I thought it was going to be swung my purchase from the Canon to the Nikon. I have not regretted the decision since. The Nikon takes crisp photos. It has many modes, of which we use 'NORMAL' (640x480) the most since we can store ~105 photos on the 8Mb memory card. 'FINE' (1024x768) and 'WIDE' (1134x680?) are the next two most frequent and finally either of the MACRO settings. We have found the Optical 'ZOOM' is disappointing more often than not so we basically do not use it very much anymore. Battery life is quite sufficient, and we have found we can easily make the batteries last for a full 'roll' of 100 pictures even with reviewing the photos on the well lit and very clean LCD screen. However, if you get showing the photos around on the LCD or use it during photo taking, the battery life is sucked dry very quickly. One annoyance is the lack of an audible click for the shutter button. I had not realized how many people including myself use the 'click' as Pavlovian feedback telling us we have just taken a picture. So I often give the camera to a friend and watch the take the picture and then proceed to ream on the button in hopes that the 'click' is coming with the extra pressure. The flash quality is good, even though for really good results in dark areas such as a pub, the limit is about 6-7 feet away from the subject otherwise the photos come out quite grey. Also note that the flash is a separate unit from the camera which attaches with a thumb wheel screw and contains it's own Lithium battery. The Lithium lasted about 7 months of pretty frequent flash photography (a guess would be 400-700 pictures) but when it ran out it gave the behaviour of leaving the 'flash ready' light on, but not flashing when the photo was taken. At first I liked the concept of the detachable flash unit, but in practicality we never took it off in the entire 9 months and it gives the impression of flimsiness when you hold it. It is not a great deterrent but in the next camera I will likely look for a built in flash. Please note however that the camera itself is very solid. Everyone who uses it comments on how it feels and what a great size it is to hold. The camera's focus is impressive. Generally I would say 95% of our pictures come out well with the other 5% being attributed to not holding the unit still enough (as is a problem with all digitals I have used) or poor lighting. We did continue to carry our Canon EOS Rebel Xs 35MM SLR on the trips but we found we took about 70% of the photos with the digital and 30% with the SLR so it greatly reduced the film cost. Although my fiancee says we just took more digital photos. One other usage was taking digital photos of the real photos. This worked reasonably well with holding the digital still enough was always a challenge and required some trial and error. The Nikon is definitely not a replacement for an SLR yet however. We just we able to take more goofy photos. The Nikon software package is flaky and in reality I would say it is very useable but crashes FAR too often. Also I find I have to brighten every photo by 15% for web publishing. I wish there had been an easy was to do this globally to all the photos. Also an automatic web page creation mechanism from the Nikon 'album' would have been a very nice feature. As it is I wrote an emacs macro to automate this for me, but it is still a little time intensive. All in all we are very happy with the Nikon CoolPix 600. Here are some sample photos we took with the camera: Great: http://members.spree.com/family/cwkemp/Photos/1999/Warwick/warwick_swans.jpg Good: http://members.spree.com/family/cwkemp/Photos/1999/Iceland/lief_eriksson.jpg Average: http://members.spree.com/family/cwkemp/Photos/1999/Iceland/cafe_gang.jpg Bad (on ZOOM): http://members.spree.com/family/cwkemp/Photos/1999/Rachels_Wedding/all_cousins.jpg Awful (not putting any of these up ;-) P.S. You can check the specs out at http://www.klt.co.jp/Nikon/Digital_Cameras/e600/specs/usa.html  |
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