The Nikon Coolpix 995 - The...

I have put the Nikon 995 away again, replaced by the modern Canon G11. Spending some time using my old Nikon Coolpix 995 has been an interesting experiment. This was the camera I carried day in and day out for several years, carrying it again was a trip through treasured memories. In the process I remembered what I liked about the 995, and what I detested.

The real results of the experiment must lie with the most telling part of any digital camera, the photographic results. The reviewers of the day rated the photographic quality as excellent. The question is as to whether the standards have changed in the face of modern cameras and eight years of technological progress.

The Nikon 995 produces a very respectable photo, but it comes up a short when compared to a modern high end digital like the Canon G series. I suspect the real difference is not in the lens or in the sensor, not that much has changed in those areas of camera design. What has changed dramatically is the processing engines, the digital manipulation that takes place after the photo is taken and before storage to the memory card. The camera companies have poured millions of dollars of R&D budgets at this part of camera design and this money has resulted in significant advances.

Canon incorporated their lessons in the Digic series of image processing chips, such as those that are used in all of their DSLR cameras and selected compacts like the G series. Nikon currently uses their Expeed series chips in many of their upper and midrange cameras. It is these chips that take the raw data from the sensor and manipulate it into the final image that is downloaded later, in the process cleaning up sensor artifacts like noise, performing the color processing and much more.

When I compare what I was able to do in the last month with my several generations out of date Nikon, to what I have done in the last week with the new Canon G11, the differences are quite noticeable. The modern camera's photos are more crisp, better color balance and far fewer artifacts. There have been real advances in digital camera technology, and you can see that difference.

Another basic conclusion is that a 3.14Mpix image is simply not enough resolution. It does have some advantages, the images are only 600-700k and the tiny 64 and 128Mb CF cards of the day were more than sufficient. I was amazed at how fast the card downloaded, a few seconds compared the the couple minutes it would take to download a full 4Gb SD card. But when it comes to the processing the lack of resolution quickly becomes apparent. Not that I needed the 12Mpix of the Canon G9, that was so much that I was always downsampling the images. The 10Mpix of the new Canon G11 seems a much better solution, and may be the ideal resolution for the sort of photography I do.

There is still an Amazon sale page for 995, with a couple cameras available used starting at $185. On eBay the camera is available for $80 or less in some auctions. The original feature summary makes good reading, but interestingly the camera retains a good rating and a very good Amazon sales rank, a sign of the market response to an excellent camera.

While spending some quality time with and old friend has been interesting, it is time to put the 995 back into the box and to enjoy new G11!