The Best Mid-class Choice

I once owned a Mustek 640 by 480 pixel digital camera three years ago. The quality of the picture is completely unsatisfactory. But when I saw a picture taken by one of my friends' Nikon Coolpix 950, I was shocked how good the quality is. I then searched for prices online for a similar product and found that the Nikon Coolpix 800 has the best value without the loss of quality.

The pictures I took with it are excellent. I am a researcher in microscopy so I know Nikon makes superb quality optical instruments but I did not realize how good their digital cameras are. The camera has a trusty Nikkor all-glass, multi-coated 7 elements lens, with aspherical elements. The CCD has 2.11 million pixels -- good enough to print very high quality traditional 6" by 4" picture. I printed out a photo of this size taken by it using a Epson 740 Photo printer and it has the same details, if not more, than a traditional film picture. The pictures I took at night in a park also turned out great. Besides all the features the traditional film autofocus camera has, the user can shoot 1 second of movie with 30 frames per second. Another good feature is that Nikon makes it adaptable to other lens like fish-eye, wide-angle, tele-converter, and filters.

There are several shortcomings: The very annoying thing is its lens cap. They should have made it built-in. I scratched the lens and almost damaged the coating several times when I removed the cap from the lens. I also had trouble locating the cap when I finished the picture taking. Secondly, it has no USB port. One can use its serial port to transfer data but it takes very long when one has, say, 32 MB of pictures. I bought a SanDisk USB flashmemory card reader for less than $20 and it worked great.

Comparing the prices of the Coolpix series, the 800 has the best value -- the 950 is >$250 more expensive with only a little more optical zoom, and some other small trivial features; the 700 is about $50 less expensive with no zoom at all; and all three has the same CCD chip. Digital picture taking has matured to a degree, and I think the Nikon Coolpix 800 is the best choice for this purpose.