Product Reviews

Digital cameras may seem like a bit of a fad, given that they tend to be fairly low resolution or ridiculously expensive. However, over the course of a few months the technology has improved and costs have fallen. With major 35mm film manufacturers, technology companies and camera companies all releasing models, the way of the future seems clear. It's no surprise to see that Nikon, one of the foremost 35mm camera manufacturers, has released its own digital camera: the CoolPix 100.

What is a surprise, given that Nikon has traditionally worked at the top end of the market, is that the £439 CoolPix is a relatively low-end device, with minimal features but good performance. The CoolPix is about the size of a TV remote control (60 « 155 « 32mm) and weighs just 160g. It may not be quite shirt-pocket size, like Kodak's tiny DC20 (reviewed issue 23, p146), but it certainly fits in a jacket pocket comfortably.

Despite its size, it has an built-in flash, self-timer mode, macro capability, auto-exposure and a small but informative and easy-to-read LCD control panel. It doesn't have any expansion capability for flash cards or hard drives like Canon's PowerShot 600 (reviewed issue 26, p191) and there's no colour LCD to view captured images, like the Kodak DC25 (reviewed issue 29, p162) or Ricoh's RDC-2 (reviewed issue 28, p172).

The Nikon is incredibly easy to use. A few simple buttons let you select flash on, off or auto, anti-red eye mode, image quality or the fixed ten-second timer. A button on the side selects standard or macro mode, with the latter letting you focus on objects from 5.5in to 9in. The 330,000 pixel LCD screen gives a resolution of 512 « 480 pixels and image quality selects between 10:1 (fine) and 20:1 (normal) compression. Individual images are about 46Kb and 23Kb respectively, and the 1Mb of Flash memory will hold about 21 fine or 42 normal images.

Many digital cameras use some form of camera battery, often Lithium types for longer life. But these tend to be expensive and difficult to find. Nikon has opted to use standard AA batteries which are cheap and readily available, but Nikon does restrict use to alkaline only, not rechargeable NiCads.

The CoolPix is unashamedly designed for use with a laptop, and provided your machine has a PC Card

ADVERTISEMENT

interface it's simplicity itself to use. Pressing catches on either side of the CoolPix separates the camera itself from the battery holder and you then have a PC Card device that's treated as an ATA hard drive and just needs a Type II or Type III slot.

I put the CoolPix into a 200MHz MMX laptop I was testing at the time, and Windows 95 told me I had a Nikon CoolPix, installed a hard disk driver and presented the CoolPix as another disk drive. Installing PC Card devices isn't always so easy, and several other machines all required tweaking to get them to recognise the card. This is no reflection on the Nikon, but a general comment about the state of PC Card.

Files are stored as MS-DOS format JPEG files and can be copied to another location like any other file. My machine had JPEG files associated with Netscape Navigator and double-clicking a file on the camera loaded Navigator and displayed the image. Elapsed time from photographing to displaying was about ten seconds.

Nikon provides some basic imaging software called Easy Photo for Windows 3.x and Macintosh, but although Easy Photo will run under Windows 95, there's no native 32-bit version. Image editing facilities are minimal and include basic colour and brightness/contrast control, crop and rotate and a couple of automated tools to remove red eye and scratches. There's a useful thumbnail browser complete with a database that lets you name and add a comment to each photo, and search on these fields.

Image quality in non-macro mode is good, though the f4 lens will use fill-in flash in most indoors situations. With flash, results are reasonable indoors but without it, pictures are drab, flat and under-exposed. The best results are outdoors in natural light.

Macro mode is another story. The flash is automatically disabled, because it would burn out images at that range. Without it only the best light will give adequate exposure. Even then images are somewhat blurred and fine detail is missing.

Leaving aside the vagaries of PC Card, the Nikon CoolPix couldn't be much easier to use, both to take pictures and to get them into your PC (provided you have a PC Card). As with all cameras in this price range, the resolution means any images printed in sizes much above 5 « 3in are going to show their digital origins. Some compression artefacts are visible, as is the dither pattern, but for newsletters and Web sites the Nikon provides good results with excellent build quality and ease of use, all at a good price.

Nikon is marketing the CoolPix as a computer peripheral and not as a camera. Image quality for holiday snapshot-size prints won't match a half-decent compact camera at a fraction of the cost. You're paying for the ease and convenience of digital photography and, if the resolution and PC Card limitations of the CoolPix suit your needs, it's a worthwhile product.