| Robert Cowart's Nikon CP900s Site
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| Photo courtesy Nikon |
The Nikon CP900s is a fun and well-designed piece of photographic gear. I'm pretty happy with my new purchase, so I decided to put up a web site showing what it can do, and shaing ideas and tips with other digital photographers and hobbyists. I have no affiliation with Nikon, other than as someone enjoying their camera. This page discusses what I have learned about it, and mostly is a place where you can see the photos I've created with it, as my collection grows. I'll also add tips and tricks as I discover them.
Overall, I think this this is possibly the best camera on the market in its price range (~$700 U.S.). It doesn't have some of the control features of, say, the Agfa 1680 or 1280, and doesn't have the SLR features of the Olympus 500 and 600. And it's not as small as the new Olympus 900, or the Fuji DX-700. But the pictures out of this thing are phenomenal, with little or no help from the manual settings, or tweaking the output on a computer. The ISO speed rating is a little low and so the only real disappointment I have had is that under non-flash conditions in medium to low light, moving object will blur. But it does have a viewfinder as well as a fast LCD for previewing. And the 945-step autofocus is amazingly accurate. The famous Nikon spot, matix, and center-weighted exposure settings work as expected: you can fine tune what gets exposed properly and what doesn't. You don't have aperature or shutter priority settings like the Agfa offers, but oh well. You do get the Compact Flash media, which is preferable to SmartMedia (which Olympus and Agfa use) in my opinion, since it is available in higher capacities. You can take up to 2 frames per second in VGA (640x480) mode. In "manual" record mode, there is quite a handful of options for stuff like adjusting the exposure, contrast, settings for special lenses (wide angle and fisheye), continuous shooting modes, forced VGA resolution, black and white only, white balance settings, and the like.
Once you have some pictures in the camera, you can plug the camera into your TV set even, and watch a slide show visiting the family over Thanksgiving. You can see a nice arrangement of thumbnails on the camera's built-in screen, selectively delete multiple files at once, and use digital zoom during playback (as well as when taking shots, of course).This camera is a little large, but still I can cram it into my pants pocket (don't try to do this with blue jeans on). It's a LOT smaller than the Oly 500 or 600, the Canon PowerShot 70, the new Sony SLR, etc. Of course, you can plug the camera's card into your laptop or external card reader and download the pix quickly. Or you can "mount" the camera (via the digital connector cable and software) so it communicates directly with your computer, uploading and downloading files. (However, this is relatively slow.)
The 900s, an update to the well-received CP900, was released in the Fall of 1998. The 900s speeds up the time between changing modes (i.e. from Rec to Play) and during bootup. It's certainly quick enough now. Nikon also added a connector for external flash. And you now get a lens cap with the camera. (Attach it to the shoulder strap, or you will lose it, like I did. One user glued velcro to the inside of the cap and to the flat area above the lens. He sticks the cap up above the lens when taking shots) The only way to tell you have the S model is by looking for the flash connector and looking on the bottom of the camera for the model number. There were a few other goodies with the "s" model, too, such as a Duke Nuken CD (big whoop), and IPIX software for making 360-degree spherical images, assuming you want to pay $25 per picture and buy the bug-eye lens for the camera.The result is very cool, but it's expensive. Actually, Nikon gives you the "key" to create three pictures (a $75 value, supposedly) with the camera, so it could be worse.
Batteries |
The batteries supplied with the Coolpix basically suck, since they are just alkalines. They will only last for a few pictures and some reviewing in playback mode. I'm very happy with the Kodak model K1000 NiMH battery charger and the four AA cells that come with it. The batteries are 1450 milliamp-hour jobs. I purchased these through www.ssdonline.com. Cost was about $49, and they pump along for quite a long time between charges. I can go for days without charging them, taking photos pretty regularly. And they charge fairly quickly. Well worth the cost. There are other sites devoted soley to batteries for these cameras. I have read about the alternatives, such as the Quest brand, but decided to go for the Kodak package. I assume Kodak did their homework, and the charger and batteries come together, and is a very small and clean package. It can slide into a pants pocket very easily, and even has rounded corners so it wont tear your pocket. |
Digital Film |
I'm currently using the 8M card that came with the camera. However, I'm planning on getting a 64M card from Lexarmedia in addition to the 8M. Why Lexarmedia? They supposedly make the fastest cards, so time lag between shots will be minimized. Check the site at www.lexarmedia.com for details. |
Source for camera? |
Got my camera at www.ssdonline.com also (State Street Direct). There was some screwup in delivery, and I'm still waiting for my wide-angle lens. I've had to stay on them, over the phone, to get the order straight. However, there are real people you can talk to there, and they had the best price I could find anywhere. About $679. So I am pretty happy about that. I also purchased the wide-angle adaptor from them, for about $89 as I recall. |
Shooting |
Even using the normal lens (no wide
angle attachment), you can make brilliant panorama
images. But a few points to remember: Keep the camera on a tripod. Overlap as much as 50% for each picture if you are going to use a stitching program such as Encore's Quickstitch (included with your Nikon). It helps the program figure out what is what. You can increase the number of shots in a panorama to 6x6 in that program, you know. That means 36 shots can be combined into a huge panorama compilation. Click on the Grid + or - buttons to alter the number of cells in the template. Since this camera doesn't have an easy way to ensure the same exposure level over a number of shots, you may find that taking several shots for use in a panorama (such as a sunset) results in portions that have uneven brightness when stitched together. The workaround is to use one portion of the skyline (or whatever you're shooting) for your light level. Aim the camera there, depress the shutter button halfway, then move the camera to the next shot, and fully depress the shutter button. Repeat for each shot. Assuming the focal distance is the same for all shots (such as infinity, -- in which case you may want to lock the focus button on the little "mountain" icon), this approach works quite well. See the panorama shots below for examples. |
Closeups |
The trick here is to set the focal setting
to Macro. Then back up a bit (be no closer than about
8"). Then use the zoom to zero in. You can even use
the digital zoom (hold for 2 seconds in the max zoom
position) if you don't care about a little loss in
quality due to pixilation. (Check the zoomed orchid macro
as an example). Best to use external light, as the flash will be off center (due to its physical location relative to the lens), and will likely cause glare. Play around with your light source first, checking the LCD display as a preview. Hold very still, or use a tripod. A little wiggle, and your result will be blurry. If hand holding, press the shutter down half way. If the green light isn't blinking, you're ready to go all the way. Press carefully, and don't let up. I notice that handholding works best if I press and hold the button down, rather than press and let up. That wiggles the camera more. |
Transfering images |
Getting images into the computer is best done using a PCMCIA reader or a notebook computer with a PCMCIA card slot. I have two laptops attached to my LAN. I simply remove the card from the camera, insert it into the CF adaptor, and insert that into the laptop. I then "share" the PCMCIA drive for use by other computers. Now it's super easy to move images around. I just click on Network Neighborhood from my desktop machine (assuming I want to use my 15" LCD monitor for working on the pix), browse to and select the images, right-click on them and choose Cut. Then I target the destination directory using Windows Explorer, right-click on it, and choose Paste. This effectively cleans off the Compact Flash disk while simultaneously moving the images into the target directory (typically the the hard disk on my desktop computer). |
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The Pictures...In the following sections I have posted pictures for you to see, both in small or large format. The usual methods apply: Click a page link to see thumbnails. Then click on a thumbnail to see the larger picture. Photos are arranged by category, and then added by me in pages as I accumulate them. Each page has a maximum of 15 thumbnails on it. Check the file size first (shown under the thumbnail)! If you're using a slow connection, it might take a while. Most of these pix are about 256K in size (that's a typical picture size using "normal" compression). Some are larger, though, more like 500K, since I want to offer some in "fine" quality.Not all the page links below are active. Some are just placeholders waiting for my collection to grow. I'm just getting the pix up this week (Dec 14), so check back soon for more. | |||||||||
Macro |
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| People
and Misc |
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| Wide-angle |
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| Panorama |
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I've put up a chatboard, using the WebBoard program from O'Reilly and Associates. There you can post messages, post pictures, and see other people's pictures. If you don't have a web page for sharing your pictures with others, or don't want to hassle with doing that, then use the web board. Just click on this link, sign in, and then click on Bob Cowart's Digital Imaging Conference once you see a list of topics. To post a picture, click on Post, then write some text and attach a JPG (or GIF).
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Author, musician, and amateur
photographer, Robert Cowart is primarily known for his
many computer books, most of them covering PC operating
systems (including 12 books on variants of Windows). Well
over a million copies of his books have been printed in
many languages. For more about that, check out www.cowart.com or www.masteringwindows.com. You can read about and even
order books from there, including Mastering Windows 98,
Windows NT Unleashed, and Windows NT Server 4.0
Administrator's Bible. "I have an affinity for visual arts as well as for computers. The computer is such an amazing tool for image manipulation, video editing and audio editing that I've chucked my film cameras and analog audio gear, and play only with digital now. The feedback and gratification are so immediate that sending photos to the developer is clearly history. Not to mention that being able to share photos with people via email or the web beats carrying them around in printed form." |
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This page last updated Dec 17, 1998
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