Product Reviews

The digital camera market has reached something of a watershed of late. Most high-end cameras have breached yet another resolution barrier, with three million pixel CCDs now being included, and images up to 2,048x1,536 in size possible. Indeed, the 3.34 megapixel CCD in this Nikon CoolPix 990 is its chief selling point.

This latest advance, however, is much less of a great leap forward than when the one and two million pixel barriers were broken. The simple reason behind this is that, for most purposes, this sort of resolution is overkill. For 6 « 4in photographs, a 1.5 megapixel camera will do the job perfectly well, even when coupled with the latest super-high resolution printers. In most cases, as proved by Canon's PowerShot Pro70 in last year's digital camera Labs, a superior optical engine and advanced controls and options are more important than a higher resolution.

Fortunately, Nikon's cameras have always competed well on this front, balancing advances in technology with a solid grounding in traditional camera values; the new CoolPix 990 is no exception. On the design front the 990 follows a similar brief to its predecessor the CoolPix 950. It's split into two independently rotateable halves, with the lens, light-metering and auto-focus apparatus, optical viewfinder and flash housed in one, and all of the controls, LCD screen and shutter release built into the other. It makes for a flexible solution, enabling you to take pictures at angles that would be awkward with a one-piece design.

Build quality is uncompromising too, and several ergonomic improvements have been made. It's slightly larger and heavier than the 950, but this is mainly down to its bigger handgrip, which extends further forward and makes the camera much easier to hold. The 990 also features an easier to use adjuster dial, which is now thumb rather than forefinger operated and is used in combination with various button presses for instant quality mode and setup adjustments. There's also a directional thumbpad to the right of the screen. It's not the most intuitive of systems to work out, but once you get used to its idiosyncrasies it works

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quickly and is very responsive.

Nikon's cameras have never been short on features and this latest offering is as stacked as they come. On the optical front, it packs an 8-24mm 3x zoom lens (equivalent to a 38-115mm, 35mm camera lens), a macro mode with a range down to an incredible 2cm, as well as four autofocus modes, including manual focus. It also boasts four shooting modes: fully automatic, aperture priority, shutter speed priority and fully manual for the ultimate in flexibility. Shutter speeds can be adjusted from 1/1,000th of a second right down to an eight-second exposure time, while the aperture range on offer goes up from 3.5 to 9.8. As you'd expect, white balance and exposure compensation can be set to automatic or adjusted manually. There's also a raft of continuous shot options including the ability to shoot MPEG-1 movie clips - up to 40 seconds of action can be captured at a resolution of 320x240 on a 16Mb CompactFlash card. The option to connect an external flash unit is provided by a small three-pin connector on the underside of the left half of the unit and, to top it all, the camera connects via USB, ensuring swift download of even the largest images.

On top of this impressive list, Nikon has added a further feature. The BSS (best shot selector) function, also featured in the 950, takes a series of pictures, analyses them, and picks the sharpest one. This works well most of the time and is handy for longer exposure shots when you don't have a tripod.

In terms of performance and image quality, the 990 is as impressive as its list of features suggests. There's the capacity for shooting uncompressed TIFF images at full resolution, but this is impractical since it only allows you to fit a single image on the supplied 16Mb card. Fortunately, the next level down - low level JPEG compression - allows ten 2,048x1,536 images to be stored with virtually no loss of quality, while in XGA mode, which is fine for printing 4x6in photos, there's room for up to 40 pictures. The only disappointment is that there's a big gap between XGA and maximum resolution.

Image quality in all resolutions is superb, with an astonishing level of detail captured in all of our test shots, and colour balance didn't pose the same problems as with the 950. We couldn't, however, distinguish a significant difference in quality between the 990 and the current A List resident, Olympus' Camedia C-3030ZOOM (reviewed issue 70, p173), so in the end it came down to features and price. In terms of features, the CoolPix wins thanks to its wide sweep of capabilities, the ability to squeeze more images into 16Mb and its innovative BSS feature. In terms of price, the Olympus just edges it and so hangs on to its A List place.