Nikon Coolpix S3000
At less than 18mm wide, the Coolpix S3000 is a super-slim camera, and its metal body comes in a choice of seven colours. You get a pretty decent spec for the price, including a 12Mp CCD and 4x optical zoom (27-108mm), plus four anti-blur systems - which, at this price point, means high ISO and digital systems rather than optical. There are also smile and blink detection systems, plus subject tracking. A nice touch is a choice of AC or USB charging, and battery life is rated good for 220 frames. Colour reproduction was good, but a number of shots suffered from slight softness and overexposure.
Click for a full-resolution crop
Reg Rating 70%
COMMENTS
Big MP
Unfortunately it's consumers and retail in the UK driving for more MP as it's a simple quantative number that people use as a more == better comparison. Other markets do not care so much about it. The vendors are just repsonding to market demand.
Until consumers get educated and demand better image quality then it will stay this way. Image quality is hard to compare though.
Ah the MP race...
So long as the numbers keep rising the punters keep paying. You whack up the MP but fit these things will shonky pinhole lenses. Everyone whacks up the quality settings and wonders why there is grain and noise and the clarity is not so great. No viewefinders, so a nice bright sunny day when you are most likely to use these and you can see precisely bugger all in the screen while you're shooting!
The other thing is these camera produce huge resolution pictures, so as soon as you offload the pictures, you end up constantly clicking sharpen and denoise filters in your favourite software and reducing the resolution to get something half decent that doesn't make you wince when you see a nice single colour area iike a solid blue sky.
Just like all other industries, numbers make good PR and help shift units, so on the race goes!
Give me a Nikon D2X anyday, might be long in the tooth now but still knocks out pukka shot!
Wrong priorities!
These 14MP resolutions have gotten ridiculous at the consumer level. It's disappointing that engineers from all brands are focusing so much energy on this non-problem.
For regular use, I don't find it necessary to go above half that, and frequently use lower resolutions just to reduce storage.
All things being equal, it would not be so bad, however engineering is always about striking a balance between competing goals. The high resolution comes at the cost of graininess, higher processor requirements, more battery power, slower shutter speed. At this point, all of those are more important to me than the resolution.
The main flaw I find with all consumer cameras I've tried is terrible graininess at the high ISO settings required to prevent hand held night/indoor shots from blurring. It's a real shame to resort to grainy high ISO modes at museums that, understandably, only permit no-flash photography.
Reducing graininess should be engineering priority #1 for the sensors.
Why use percentages...?
Seriously guys, why the hell bother using a scale with 101 discrete options if you're only going to use 3 of them?
Were the four cameras rated at 80% really identically good? Or the three at 75%? or the three at 70%?
untitled
What happened to the round-up page? If you are going to split an article like this over ten pages so that it is impossible to just scroll between them, you could at least devote one page to a quick summary/comparison of them all.
