Nikon Coolpix 995 Review

Overall Rating

The Nikon Coolpix 995 is a limitless digital camera and the creme of the Coolpix genre.
Night-time noise reduction is stunning.
Excellent bundle as standard.

Shipped 16MB CF card too small.
Only certain CF cards will work (i.e. TwinMOS won't).
Li Batt won't charge if cycle is interrupted.
2nd Li essential as hard to predict when battery flat.

My previous camera was a Kodak DC240. It's fundemental problems were mis-fired shots and bad dithering when the picture should have had blended colour. So in the end, it had to go.

The Nikon Coolpix 995 is an AMAZING digital camera. It achieves this on many levels. No only is it lighter than my aging Kodak, but the picture quality and crispness in colour tone is unsurpassed.

I mulled over many high-end digital cameras but chose the Nikon fundementally for picture quality and the fact it works either as a totally automatic or a totally manual camera.

Absolutely every property of the camera can be configured, and quick user-presets allow you to store the three most refined (I allocate them to a day, indoor and night setup).

Anytime I take a bad picture, I tweak the appropriate property to resolve the problem. Settings such as BSS (best shot selector) allow me to make objective refinements as well.

Some reviews slate three things in the Coolpix, of which I'd like to respond. These are:

* Barrelling
* Blue Fringing
* Saturation / Coolness

For me, my experience is that all lenses barrel in the extreme, I however have not noticed any barrelling effect. Okay, maybe I'm not taking pictures of fence posts here and therefore don't see it, but it certainly hasn't interfered with any of my pictures as some reviews suggest.

Blue/Purple Fringing also hasn't appeared. I've been taking dark trees in autumn against bright cloudy skylines and still haven't seen adverse effects on maximum post-process zoom.

Maybe these things have been corrected in the firmware. The camera ships with 1.5, although 1.6 is easyly downloaded and flash-upgraded from the Nikon.co.uk website.

The saturation / coolness however is another story. If you take pictures on Automatic you will see this (I suppose a definitive cool-pics trait); pictures seem to have less vibrant colour than you would expect. To this end, Nikon allows you to increase the saturation level on the 995 to get round the problem. I, however, noticed that the problem didn't stem from the saturation level, but rather the automatic white-balance (wb). If you manually set the wb to your conditions (fine, cloudy, preset etc) then the colour rendition is just perfect.

But my most amount of pleasure comes from night photography as this is where the Nikon wins over all other digital cameras. Not only does the camera allow 60 second exposures, but it's night-time noise reduction circuitry is just stunning. Set the wb to sodium (by taking a measurement of white under a street light) and night-time city pictures become day.

In short, I just love this camera. For me, it's totally limitless and about the smallest/lightest digital camera you can by that works in a totally manual or automatic way. To see what two-years of technology have done to the world is a total revelation and I can't praise the Nikon Coolpix 995 enough.