Nikon COOLPIX 2200 Digital Camera

I got this camera to replace my Kodak CX4200 which broke :( and so far it has been a good investment. I don't have any of the old battery-eating problems and hopefully it wont break. It looks far more advanced and durable than my old camera, and it isn't as much of a brick. The buttons are quite close together but that doesn't bother me because I'm little. The little return button bulges out a bit so you wont accidentally push an arrow button instead like on my Nokia 3650. There is nothing to cover the screen, so if you put your finger on it you get a big blue spot and little waves around it, and it also gets dirty easily, and if it gets scratched its the actual screen that gets damaged. However there is a little "frame" that the screen is sort of buried in that prevents it from coming in contact with anything that might scratch it.

The camera has 3x optical zoom which is a great improvement over my other camera which didn't have any. It also has 10x digital zoom but if you zoom it in all the way the picture just becomes a big blur scattered with interference, you can still make out what distant objects are but it just isn't great unless you only use it a little bit. It is only a 2 mega pixel camera but I'm not the sort of person who goes around getting the pictures printed, and I also don't need the pictures to be 20 times the size of the screen. I just don't need the level of detail that lets me count the warts on the nose of a guy walking on a street 10 miles away while I'm standing on the top of a mountain. But if you don't think 2 is enough there is also the 3200 that is pretty much the same but with an extra mega pixel and it can record sounds, but unfortunately that costs another #100 and that just wasn't worth it for me. The picture quality is also quite good, unlike my old camera where there would be areas of weirdness that weren't really blurry but just little random lines or strange colours but that isn't the case with this camera.

Using the zoom on some distant objects makes the pictures very blurry. Turning on a little feature called BSS reduces the blurriness by a good bit. If the pictures are still blurry you can use one of the many "image mode" things with a fast shutter setting but that makes the pictures darker. I don't see why they couldn't put in a manual shutter speed option - its not like its actually that hard or anything and they could still put it in using a firmware upgrade but I don't really expect them to, big corporations would rather have us buy a new camera than provide updates for an existing product unless its a very serious blunder and their share prices are dropping by the minute.

The little round dial has 8 different modes, each with their own menu's and settings but occasionally when I turn the camera on it tells me it isn't in the correct position and refuses to do anything until I turn the little dial but this is because it somehow got moved a bit but not enough to put it in the next mode. If you just want to look at the pictures you can put it in set up before you turn it on and then push the preview button and it wont open the lens - it probably saves a bit of battery if you do it that way. The camera is quite fast to start up and you can pretty much take pictures after the lens is opened, unlike my other camera where I had to wait about 10 seconds for it to read the memory card. The menu's are quite good and easy to use, except the little icons in some of the image modes are a bit confusing sometimes. There are lots of little customisable features *except shutter speed* unlike my other camera which only had 2 little menus and after 2 minutes playing with it I just thought "is that all there is to it??"

It can also record little videos (without sound) but the quality is absolutely crap with the 160x120 mode. Not only is it very small but also grainy and full of interference. The 320 and 640 modes are good enough though but they eat memory. The 14 meg internal memory is fine for taking pictures, it takes 15 high quality pictures using the internal memory and 29 "normal" ones which are the same size (1600x1200) as high quality but just more compressed, if you took a "normal" picture of the sky there would be little rectangles about 10 pixels wide scattered about it where the colours are fairly similar and there isn't much detail. It can also take 1024x768 and 640x480 pictures and you can resize these to even smaller pictures (320x240 and 160x120) if you are caught for space or whatever. You can also zoom in on a saved picture and make a separate image of the area you zoomed in on, and have the camera take greyscale, sepia and bluish looking pictures. Don't know why they made that feature as you could easily do it with paint shop. But for some reason they wasted time making those features instead of a manual shutter option. But still nice little things to play around with. There is also "vivid colour" which makes the pictures look like a food advert with extremely high contrast. I have a 64mb SD card for it and it can store about 60 high quality pictures, or like 500 640x480 ones. I guess if I go on holidays I will just have to turn them all into 640x480 images if I'm caught for space.

There is a feature that lets the camera pretend to be a "USB mass storage device" so there is no need for special software even though it is included, but I haven't tried it yet because I'm just lazy and use the mass storage thing. This was particularly handy when I was using a laptop that doesn't let ordinary users install exe files. Using mass storage it should also work on my Linux machine but I haven't tried that yet.

Battery life is all right, it doesn't eat. It says 0.7 amp 2.4v on the back of it, my old camera said 2 amps. Of course if you use the flash all the time it will still eat. Turning off the screen will make the batteries last longer but you can only turn off the screen using the "set up" menu. The battery will still run down when connected to the computer even though you can't take pictures with it, but maybe that only happens when you use a USB hub. There is no real battery indicator either, just a low warning and some time later it says "Battery exhausted" and turns itself off. If I take it on holidays I will most likely be taking my collection of 14 NiMH and 8 NiCd batteries and I wouldn't run out of batteries. My old camera would however empty them all in a day.

I paid #99 for this camera in Selfridges. It was supposedly reduced from #150 but everywhere else #99 was the normal price. I think it's a good deal for all the features, and optical zoom. My old camera cost more than that but that came with a cradle and rechargeable batteries. The box contains the paperwork, a pair of alkaline batteries which didn't last very long, the software CD, USB and TV cables and of course the camera. The manual is only in English, but that doesn't bother me obviously :)