NIKON COOLPIX S205

With an astounding variety and different models of digital cameras available these days, it has become quite a complicated task to choose and buy a digital camera. A person will literally be spoilt for choice if he or she ventures in to an online or real life market. As cameras themselves have become more and more feature-loaded, the task of making a purchase decision is now no more straightforward.

For the casual photographer who wants a camera better than those available in mobile phones, an excellent choice is the Nikon Coolpix S205. With a 12 megapixel CCD image sensor giving an image resolution of up to 4000 x 3000 pixels, the Nikon S205 has the potential to take large frame-sized pictures. And with digital image stabilization technology, shaky photography situations will not affect the pictures’ clarity. The optics in the Nikon S205 provide up to 4x optical zoom, which might seem like a slight let down, but that is still more than handy for most situations. The S205 lens is fully retractable within the body of the camera. The Nikon S205 also has a 4x digital zoom, which means the digital zoom used with the optical zoom will give a combined zoom of 16x but with the obvious image degradation that comes with digital zooming.

The exterior of the Nikon S205 body has a good expensive-looking finish and is available in several colors including red and black. There is a large 2.7 inch LCD display, a built in memory of 50MB, red eye reduction, smile detection, and motion detection.

The Nikon S205 firmware has various pre-set shooting modes for almost all conceivable photography scenarios like indoor, outdoor, day, night, sunlight, cloudy, dark, bright, fast moving subjects etc. The modes, named Party/Indoor, Food, Museum, Documents, Sports Photography, Snow/Sand, Beach, Night Scene, Night Portrait, Fireworks, Panorama, Portrait, Back Light, Landscape, and Dusk/Dawn ensure that amateur photographers and novices should be able to get good looking shots most of the time.

With adjustable shutter speeds of 1 second to 1/2000 second, the Nikon S205 offers the possibility to customize according to the subject movement and light levels. Coming to light levels, the S205 has an adjustable ISO setting ranging from ISO 200 to 6400. The aperture range of f/3.2 tof/5.9 could have been better but is still good enough for the price.

Apart from still photographs, the Nikon S205 also has a video mode, with sound. The video quality can be categorized as average for a camera of this class. The video resolution is 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second, which can be classified as TV quality. Videos are stored in AVI or motion-JPEG format in the external SD card, which is not bundled with the Nikon S205 and has to be bought separately. However, with current prices for memory cards, that is hardly an issue.