I am a lazy man....If I were to buy a normal roll based camera, I’d have never been able to get the roll developed....so I decided to go for a digicam instead....add to it the fun of instant gratification and for me, a digicam won hands down over a normal camera.
Got myself a Nikon as Nikkor lenses are regarded to be the best in class in this proice segment....Carl-zeiss lenses or Hasselblad would have been too xpensive and beytond my reach anyway.
Enuff of background, let me tell you about the features of the camera:
Lens: Consideration no.1 for any photographer, the Nikon 2100 comes with a 5.4-17.2 mm Nikkor lens (translates to a 105 mm zoom, i.e. 3x) which is sufficient enough for an amateur fotographer....it also has a 4x digital zoom, but then digital zooms don’t serve much of a purpose....you may as well zoom the image indefinitely more on your PC......
Resolution: 2.1 MP which is pretty good for viewing images on a monitor and good enough for 4X3 prints (though you need to have a very good photo-quality printer for prints which still wouldn’t be as good a s roll developed print), but taking prints isn’t normally a consideration for a digicam buyer. If you need to take prints, you should go in for a nikon 3100 though
Viewfinder: Sadly, it lacks a viewfinder, you have to use the LCD screen for that (which is a big battery hog)..I really can’t understand why the Nikon guys missed out on such a simple thing!!!!
Photo modes: there is an awesome choice of 14 photo modes on the camera including night shot/portrait mode/beach-snow mode....seklestion of a suitable mode while taking pix makes a hugely perceptible differenc ein the pic. quality...Though making manual adjustments would yield better results, yet how many amateur photographers would spend even 2 mins on adjusting everythng manually
Manual adjustment features: You can play around with the whiten balance, metering and exposure settings....sadly you van’t manually adjust the apertue and the shutter timings
Memory: the camera coems with a 8 MB CF memory card that’s sadly insufficient for any1, one can get hold of 128 MB cards for as low as 1200/-though...CF cards are the cheapes memory media anyway as compared to proprietary sony memory sticks or even SD cards
Flash: The flash is good foer close shots, but inadequate for even marginally distant pics..u can’t attach an external flash :-(
Picture quality: AWESOME!!! I never expected this tiny thingie to deliver such crisp and sharp pics.......sometime I do experience some pixellation and jading in continuous surfaces like a sky shot or on a wall but all-in-all, the photo quality is extremely good
All in all, a satisfctory buy, there are better cameras available, but in this price segment, this is probably the best one u can go for....I compared this with a Kodak DX (don’t rem the model no, but the 1 that falls in the same price bracket) and an Olympus (same price bracket) and the pics were much sharper and clearer on the Nikon.
PS: The Macro mode yields astounding closeups.....I’ve clicked photos of nature that every1 thought were professionally clicked ones