I am not a pro photographer - but I use the camera a lot in my work. And someday hope to shoot great descriptive pictures of people and places.
Anyway, I needed a camera that was:
Sturdy,
Took good pictures under not very good light conditions,
Had some manual options,
Be able to take .tiff images as well as .jpeg, so I could use the pictures for print as well as web.
The Nikon Coolpix 8400, as the name suggests has 8 effective megapixels - though generally I would never need to take that quality of pictures.
It has a 24 - 85 mm 3.5x Zoom Nikkor lens that is equivalent to a 35mm lens. This works very well. I get nice close-ups, in focus. The long shots are not so great though.
The body is nice to hold, fits well in the hand. I find very small cameras hard to use, since they seem too delicate. This one has a nice sturdy feel.
The swivel 1.8 inch LCD monitor is another nice thing about this camera. Its useful when you hold the camera very high or low. Just turn the monitor up or down. Also it turns right round, which is nice when I’m fooling around with my son and we take pictures of ourselves and we can see how we look!
The quicktime movie option which takes 1 minute films is a waste though - I could have done without this. Its ok for amateur home stuff, but terrible for work purposes. The films are very heavy and unless you have a very large memory card, you have to keep downloading them all the time. The quality of the films is not very good.
On the whole, I’m happy with the camera. The colors are excellent. Even under low light conditions, you can take some good shots. The manual settings are useful, though it takes a while to set everything.
I also like the user interface which is pretty instinctive. I did’nt spend a lot of time reading the manual, but I could still figure most of it out.