Lights, Camera, Charge It!

Before purchasing a digital camera I wanted to make sure that a digital camera was what I really wanted. I take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures, some great pictures some really bad pictures. I was worried that digital photos would just not hold up quality wise to a 35mm photo, so I set out on a quest to determine what I was really looking for.
The Lens:
I use my 35mm zoom lens quite a bit so I really wanted a camera that had a decent optical zoom because when using a digital zoom picture quality tends to fall apart. The Nikon CoolPix offers a 3x optical zoom that does a really good job and to my surprise the digital zoom (4x with a 12x total zoom) on this model will still allow you to take a decent picture (you must have the monitor on to use the digital zoom).
The Battery:
The next feature that was important to me was the number of photos I would be able to take with the battery fully charged. I have Cannon printer that has a 20 dollar a week ink cartridge habit and I really did not want a camera with a bad battery habit. On average I take 4 (36 exp)rolls of film a week, I travel a lot and so I wanted to make sure that I was properly powered. With the Nikon CoolPix I have been able to take 120 photos on one fully charged new battery (it remains to be seen if this number will hold up in the future). But the nice thing about this camera is that besides using the rechargeable battery it can also use a regular camera battery which I was able to take about 90 shots with (over 4 days) before it died.
Features:
I wanted a camera that would allow me to take a wide variety of shots from very close up to wide open space landscape type shots. So far I have been happy with the cameras ability to take still shots and take them well. One area that I have not been happy with are action shots. A basketball game was almost impossible to shoot, even after trying just about every setting the camera had. The camera can take up to 30 frames a second but it then ties itself into knots and you are without a camera until everything is written to the card. Overall if you are not shooting a basketball game I think you will be very happy with all of the automatic options and do try the manual settings, after all the pictures are free unless you print them!
Software (added cost $60):
At best I can only describe the photo editing software that comes with this camera as a disaster or at least it is a disaster when used with Windows XPPro. I could spend pages telling you the fixes but by far the easiest thing is to get Windows Picture It Digital Image Pro 7.0 and download your images using that. (ohhh make sure you save them and you are not just viewing them!)
The Card (add about $80-100):
Why a 16mb card? Who knows? I know! If they put a bigger card in the camera they would have to charge more and the $399 camera just became $499) The 16 mb card will only hold 8 photos when using the fine mode and 32 photos using the basic mode. Upgrade the card to at least a 128 mb card which will hold 66 fine photos, 132 normal photos or 260 basic photos.
It's a wrap:
Overall I have been very happy with this camera and I would highly recommend it.
UPDATE: When taking pictures outside in the snow make sure you use the snow setting otherwise your pictures may come out with a strange blue cast.