Review of Nikon Coolpix 995 Digital Camera

 The Nikon Coolpix 995 was the second digital camera I bought. My first one was also a Coolpix: a Nikon Coolpix 900. The 900 broke on me a few months back and hence the new Coolpix 995.

 On the surface, i.e. from the specifications, the improvements of the Coolpix 995 over it's older brother, the Coolpix 990, do not really justify shelling out the extra dollars. You can pick up a Coolpix 990 from Nikon Mall at US$650 (although a refurb. one). Besides, the 995 uses a new rechargable battery is really annoying at first thought as it renders my NiMh AA's obselete. No more swapping out of the AA's from my F100 to power up the Coolpix to get that one final digital shot.

 The other canditates that I considered before placing the order were Canon G1, Canon Pro90, Canon S110, Canon S300 and Nikon 880. The Nikon 880 was recently discontinued thus making it kind of difficult to get. The S110 and S300 are pretty cute cameras. However they are only 2Meg pixel cameras. The Pro90 is pretty interesting given its image stabilization function and the long bright zoon lens, but it also costs quite a bit more. Thus, it was pretty much a toss up between the G1 and the 995 when I found a good price for the 995. That's how I got the 995 and stuck with the Nikon lineup.

 The Coolpix 995 is a digital camera rich with features. The few short-coming immediately came to mind are: Lack of a flash hot shoe like that on the G1 and the Pro90; the ability to output files in the raw format; and interchangable lenses!!! The nice changes include the ability to use Type II CompactFlash cards, the red-eye reducing pop-up flash and the addition of quickview buttom which allows framing the new shot and viewing the old one at the same time.

 The quick view feature is a very nice feature copied from the coolpix 880. It allows me to view a previously taken shot in a 1/4 window while at the same time frame for the next one. By pressing the quick view button twice I can even view the previous shot using the full LCD screen. Zooming in is also possible in the mode. This is a marked improvement from the coolpix 900. Now I can go back to take a new shot immediately with a slight pressing of the shutter release button. Basically the difference between playback and shotting modes are now blurred. The 995 acts more like a film camera: it's always ready for the next shot, as long as there is space on the compact flash card.

 The ability to change the ISO is interesting. This was not present with the 900. I found that the 995 delievered good noise performance for ISO100 and ISO200. At ISO400 I found the noise starting to creep up a bit, but the shots are still quite usable. I had not tried much at ISO800 as I found that to be a bit noisy for my taste. There is also the noise reduction mode that I found is really useful for noise suppression for long exposures.

The autofocusing is improved significantly compared to the 900. The 900 had poor low light focusing performance. This is not so with the 995. Most of the time the focus is dead on immediately after the shutter release button is pressed. The 995 definitely hunts a lot less to focus than the 900 in poor lighting conditions. Under normal lighting conditions auto-focusing is great. Under poor lighting conditions sometimes autofocusing could take a while to lock on, which could be annoying sometimes.

Reviewing the shots are also much faster with the 995. The supplied 16Meg Lexar 8x card got filled up pretty quickly as each jpeg fine shot at the full resolution takes up about 1Meg bytes. It used to take the 900 quite a few seconds to load a picture from one of my 48Meg sandisk compact flash cards. Not so with the 995. The loading is pretty much instantaneous. However, I guess those sandisk card are a bit slow for writing to, as I found myself getting a warning when I pressed the quick view button while the camera was still trying to save the buffer to the sandisk card often.

The pictures taken so far exhibit good quality. For most situations, the exposure is perfect with the matrix meter. The color of most shots are pretty good. The few situations that the 995 didn't do well are high contrast situation and macro shots with the built-in flash. The bright details tend to wash out in high constrast situations. I usually underexpose sightly and then do corrections with photoshop. Macro shots with flash tend to overexpose a bit which sometimes can be corrected with underexposure again.

The 995 delievers very good fine jpegs. I tried printing a few of them on 8x10 photo paper with my aging Epson stylus photo 700 printer and found them pretty good compared with those I scanned from slides using the Nikon LS30. Color and saturation are very good. Details are very good. The 995 is a very good macro performer, just like my old trusted 900. The relatively small size coolpix 995 and the ability to frame using the LCD instead of the optical viewfinder make it possible to get pictures that are difficult to achieve for my F100 and N70. Am I ready to give up my F100 yet? The answer is `not quite yet'. But I do think that the 995 provides solutions to some specific shooting conditions that my film based SLR's can't.

The color LCD is still not that visible in bright light. I found it visibility about the same as my old 900. I found it a little disappointing that Nikon still haven't figured out how to fix this problem with 4 revisions of the Coolpix 9xx series. I found myself always trying to use my hands to shade the LCD in order to review the shots when I was outdoors.

The flash is not working that well, especially with macro shots. For some reason I always get grossly overexposed macro shots. Quite a few times I just have to discard the shot because the image is so overexposed. This did not happen with my old coolpix 900. For normal distance the flash seemed still tend to overexpose, but not by that much. I found myself having to dial in a -0.3 or -0.7 to compensate.

The lithium battery EN-EL1 really lasts long. One of my complains with the coolpix 900 was that it really ate batteries up real quick. This is not so with the 995. It took a few hours to fully charge EN-EL1 battery with the supplied battery charger MH-51. And then I am all set for the day, at least. I used 2 48Meg Sandisk compact flash cards and one full charge of the EN-EL1 is enough to fill them up a few times. I normally store images in jpeg fine mode which translates to about 1Meg per shot. This means the claim in the manual about battery life is reasonably good. The unfortunate downside is that once the battery runs dry, the only options are to wait for it to get recharged or to use a 2CR5 lithim or to get a spare EN-EL1. The spare EN-EL1 costs almost 4 times as much as 4 NiMh AA's.

The supplied battery charger MH-51 only recharges the EN-EL1 batteries. It does not provide DC power to the 995. This means that sooner or later I will have to come up with the dollars for the EH-21 AC adapter which acts as both the charger for the EN-EL1 and the DC power source for the 995. Also, since the 995 takes only EN-EL1 or 2CR5, this mean now I got one more piece to carry along on a trip, namely the MH-51. I wish the 995 can use AA's.

One problem I found with the 995 was that I am pretty limited in terms of aperature settings, compared to my F100. The smallest aperature I can set is only around F10. This is somewhat insufficient to generate enough depth of field for certain macro shots and to use a slow enough shutter speed to take pictures of water falls. In addition, the camera did not seemed to warn me about its inability to find a aperature-shutter speed combination in the M-mode resulting in gross underexposure or overexposure. Furthermore the lens on the 995 is pretty slow, especially at the long end, compared to the competition out there. This usually translates to using slower shutter speeds which could mean the possibility of more camera shake. If I have a choice I would like to have a faster lens with less range on the long side.

The coolpix 995 is a very good digital camera. It can deliever excellent quality shots, as long as you know its limitations. Most of the time the fully automatically setting will work just fine. You can also manually control quite a few things. Unfortunately this means going through the paper manual and then playing around with the buttons to get those features set correctly. This is sort of like my N70 SLR: I can set the features I need just like the F100, however, it may take some time for me to get there.

I found the 995 a vast improvement over the 900. The 995 powers up pretty quickly. The ability to view the shots taken without going out of the shotting mode is great. The use of the Lithium rechargable battery has its plus's and minus's. The 995's capability to take macro photos is really amazing for me.

Would I buy the 995 all over again? That's a trick question. I could use a remote like the ones with the Canon G1 and Pro90. I could possibly use the raw mode as well. And a hot shoe to mount my Nikon speedlight would be nice too. But in the mean time, I am happy that I have the 995, at least until the next revision (perhaps the 4Meg pixel one?) comes out.