So, as the Olympus E-5 is financially out of my reach and very likely due to the state of Olympus will never ever be in my sweaty little grasp, when I was asked what I wanted for my birthday this year I said a new compact.
I have an eight year old Nikon Coolpix 4100 which takes great pictures but which is now suffering old age. Sometime when I turn it on the lens refuses to wake up and stays resolutely in its housing no matter how much enticing, cajoling or threatening I do. The other thing about the 4100 is that it was fully automatic. No manual and no semi-manual modes. This made it useless for any club assignments and so therefore it wasn’t getting used much. I like to have a camera with me all the time and keep my compact in my work bag.
So permission duly granted to have a look at compacts and with a budget of £200 or thereabouts I proceeded to peruse the internet.
It had always been in my mind to get another Nikon. I know I am an Olympus man but the EPL series of cameras were all too expensive and I don’t need the interchangeable lenses – that’s what my E-series camera are for. I like the Olympus XZ-1 compact – very much – but it was £100 to dear and I didn’t want to spend that much on a compact that was probably only going to get used on the way to and from work.
I then saw the Nikon Coolpix P300 was on offer. I liked it. It has a retro style to it and it’s nice an slim so that it will fit easily into a pocket. so I paid out the £189 for a black one.
It has the manual and semi-manual controls I wanted, 16Mp but unfortunately no RAW. Still, I shall be giving it a good run-out this week to see what the results are like.
I’ll place one or two of them up here for examination.
A Sensored-View 