Nikon Coolpix 3200: A Good Camera

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. So here are many thousand words for you, the pictures that I took with my Nikon Coolpix 3200. While looking at the pictures please keep in mind that I know next to nothing about photography. I click them as the fancy strikes. If some of the images are sharp and good, it has to be the camera.

http://community.webshots.com/album/384679323wvHhFU

http://community.webshots.com/album/250384516SxsFqT

We wanted to buy a digital camera so that we can take it along on the yearly treks that we do in India (this year we are going to Laddakh in June). So for us it was very important that the camera could run on alkaline batteries, because once we had left the civilization there is no way to re-charge the batteries. That and the camera should cost less than 10,000 Indian rupees.

This request was duly conveyed to a friend in the USA and he bought Nikon Coolpix 3200 for us. I must say I am happy with my purchase. For us, we had the camera, USB cord, a cord for connecting the camera to the TV, a pair of alkaline batteries, instruction CDs and instruction manual in the box. There were no rechargeable batteries with the pack itself, and we have not bought one till date. I use my camera with 2 Duracell alkaline batteries and it just works along fine for the amount of the photography that we do.

As the name suggests, the camera has 3.2 mega pixels which seems pretty satisfactory to me for my novice photography. It also has a 3X optical zoom and a digital zoon of 4X to give a total 12X, as the manual says. Whatever that means many a times when I want to bring objects (particularly scenery) closer I wish I could zoom more.

The camera has a primary mode called Auto, and various others than can be of help in different situation. The other modes available are scene, portrait, sports, landscape and night portrait assist.

I have used the scene mode most, which offers me a ready made solution for a wide variety of situations. The options available in this mode are party/indoor, beach/snow, sunset, dusk/dawn, Night landscape, close up, museum, fireworks show, copy and backlight.

I have used close up most out of all the features because I keep clicking flowers and I find the results really nice. I have also used dusk/dawn and sunset modes. What I did on these occasions was to take a picture in the auto mode and then to take one in sunset or dawn/dusk mode. I always found the pictures taken of sunset through the sunset mode much better than the normal auto mode. All these menu options are easy to navigate and handle. In the museum mode, the flash never comes on.

The camera comes with a build-in memory of 14.5 MB which allows to save around 12-15 pictures at 3M resolution, which is really not much but standard for digital cameras? I use mine with a Sony memory card of 512 MB. It allows me to take all the pictures I ever want. Apparently I can either use the card or the internal memory at a point of time but ever since I bought the card, I have not bothered with the camera’s internal memory.

The alkaline batteries last for more than a few days of intermittent photography if I do not use the LCD screen all the time and do not go and view the photographs too often. Though, whenever I click close up I use the LCD to compose my shots. Till date the maximum number of shots I have licked in a day is 46 (using LCD for all of them) within eight hours and one set of batteries have lasted through it. I realized that if I do not use the camera for a few minutes it switches off by its own to save the batteries.

The camera allows changing the color settings from rich to natural to black and white and more. It also has options of storing pictures in various sizes like 2048x1536 to 640x480. I have never used the video mode of the camera because I use alkaline batteries and as of now I do not have rechargeable ones. If I shoot videos, I guess my batteries will get exhausted pretty soon. And I somehow love the still photographs a lot more than videos. But I also know that with my camera I have the option of adding voice to both still and movies.

It is easy transferring the pictures from the camera to my computer. I connect the USB cable and then transfer the images using Webshots or Microsoft software. I rarely use the software that comes with this camera, the Arcsoft.

Overall, I am happy with my Nikon Coolpix 3200 and I guess I have yet to explore many options of this camera. For a novice like me this is loaded enough. This camera is good for casual photography.