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Taking Pictures C-3030Z When you first turn on the C-3030Z, it takes less than four seconds to be up and running. The LCD doesn't turn on by default -- you have to hit the LCD button once to do that. The camera is exceptionally fast between shots, as well, with around three seconds between shots in HQ mode. There is no noticeable shutter lag.
If you're going to zoom in, you'll find the response very fast, and the control precise. In Program (auto) mode, you can tweak almost every setting, from white balance to ISO to manual focus. If you want more control, put it in A/S/M mode, where you can choose from shutter priority, aperture priority, or full manual mode. In aperture priority mode, you can choose from between f2.8 and f11. Shutter priority mode allows for speeds as slow as 1 second, or as fast as 1/800 sec. In full manual mode, you can tweak both aperture and shutter speed to your hearts content. You can also get the shutter speed to go for 16 seconds in this mode. You can review photos before they are saved to the memory card, but you have to do some menu olympics to get there. Hit the menu button, go to Mode Setup, scroll down to the next page, choose Rec View > Check. At first, I was annoyed that the camera forgot its settings when you turned it on. After some good reader feedback, I found that in Mode Setup, you can choose to have it remember the last settings it used, or to custom them to your liking. Now that's a lot nicer! [Updated 5/1/00] The C-3030Z is an extremely capable shooter, as is the... Coolpix 990 The CP990 turns on just as fast as the C-3030Z, except that the LCD display turns on too. When taking pictures, the CP990 is a bit slower than its competitor -- it's a bit less than five seconds between shots in Normal mode on the CP990. There is no shutter lag on the CP990.
The CP990 always lets you review the photo you have just taken, whereas the option is well hidden in the C-3030's menus. The Auto mode is pretty limited as to what you can change - just flash, macro, and quality settings are available. If you want to adjust things like ISO, manual focus, metering, white balance, and more, you use Manual Mode. By the way, the choices for ISO are the same as the C-3030Z: Auto, 100, 200, or 400. However, these are only accessible in Manual mode. In Auto mode, the ISO is 80. There are five shooting options available on the CP990 in manual mode:
Switching between all of these is very easy, using the wheel and the MODE button. The flash is on by default in Auto mode, and it remembers your last setting if you're in manual mode, which is nice since I rarely use the flash. Nikon provides a feature called BSS (Best Shot Selector), which lets you fire off as many pictures as the buffer can hold, after which it compares them and chooses the sharpest one. This is good for macro shots, where the slightest movement can blur your photo. [Added 5/1/00] Another cool feature is that when you lock focus on a picture, it tells you what it was focusing on (note the red brackets in the photo above). Winner:
Olympus C-3030Z Viewing Pictures C-3030Z The C-3030Z has a very responsive, easy to use playback system, with a few annoyances.
The good parts:
The bad:
Coolpix 990 The CP990 scrolls through photos twice as fast as the C-3030Z, but it uses a trick: it shows a low res version, and then draws the high res version over it. So while it may take a half a second to go between photos, it takes a little less than 3 seconds to actually go between high res versions. The good:
The bad:
The CP990 has a lot more info that the C-3030Z provides -- check it out:
Winner: Nikon Coolpix 990 There can never be too much information! Aside from the long delay when you pass through a movie, the CP990's playback mode is superior. Menus C-3030Z I found the menu system on the 3030 to be cumbersome and unintuitive It takes too many button pushes to do things that takes maybe two on the Coolpix. The example illustrated in a recent PC World review of this camera is partially true: their review claimed that it takes 16 button pushes to get from aperture priority to shutter priority mode. Fair enough, but there's a faster way to do it, as I'll show below:
And we've just switched from shutter to aperture priority mode in six button pushes, not 16. I'll do the same example for the Coolpix in a bit. What what options await you in the menus? Here goes for record mode:
Okay, that's enough about the 3030Z's menus, I think you get the idea. Coolpix 990 Nikon does a better job with their menus, making common operations easy to do. As promised, here's how you change the CP990 from Shutter to Aperture priority -- compare this with the C-3030Z:
Much better. I found this to be the case with most functions on the CP990. The menus can be accessed in the "traditional" way, by moving the four way switch through the menu hierarchy (below left and right). You can also just select one (See below left, that little disc with the arrows under it? That means you can use the wheel. The icon just to the left will change) and use the wheel to change them, making it even easier. You have to know what the symbols mean, though, in order for this to be useful.
Here's a rundown of the menu choices available in Manual mode-- your choices are far more limited in Auto mode:
There you have it! Winner:
Nikon Coolpix 990 Software Since this isn't usually something I cover, I'm going to keep this brief. I'm only going to mention the basic software used to get the photos off of the camera. For a change, this software is very similar on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Also for a change, I'm going to cover both the Mac and PC versions! Olympus CAMEDIA Master v2.0 Installing the software is pretty easy, especially on the Mac. On Windows 98, I had to hunt down the USB drivers on the CD after the computer rebooted. I guess Windows can't automatically install USB drivers. On the Mac, everything was ready to go right away. The software itself is almost identical on both platforms:
As you can see, they're pretty similar. On the top left of each, is your local hard drive. Just below that is the camera -- you can browse it like another disk. If you double-click on the camera (on the Mac) or the folder "100OLYMP" (on Windows), it'll open up the other window that you see above the picture of the flowers -- it features thumbnails, the filename, and the date you took the photo. If you double-click on the thumbnail, you'll get the larger version that you see above. You can select the photos you want to transfer, and download them to your hard disk via a menu command. Unlike with NikonView, you can do a lot more with the CAMEDIA software besides just downloading the photos off of the camera. Besides basic stuff like rotating and flipping your photos, you can also do basic retouching, like adjusting color, contrast, and brightness, as well as more complex filters like sharpen and blur. You can also do an "instant fix" of your photos, or use the redeye tool to help reduce troublesome redeye If you have panoramic photos, you can stitch them together in the software, as well. Keep in mind that this software isn't on the same level as Photoshop or PaintShop Pro, but it's not bad. One thing that you can't do on both platforms is browse the camera on the Finder/Windows Explorer level, like with NikonView. To top it off, Olympus also tosses in Adobe Photoshop 5.0LE, which is kind of a watered down version of the real thing. So if you need to do some fancier retouching, you've got something for that too. NikonView v3.0 Nikon doesn't include any software comparable to CAMEDIA. There is the IPIX Wizard software for making IPIX panoramas, Quicktime for video viewing, Cumulus 5.0LE for organizing your photos, and Genuine Fractals, a Photoshop plugin for interpolating or reducing photos. Even though you can't edit photos in NikonView, that's okay with my usage: When I edit my photos, it's strictly in Photoshop, so NikonView works great for me. After an easy install (again, you have to locate the drivers on the CD in Windows), you reboot and are ready to go. You just plug in the USB cable and turn on the camera, and either the camera appears on the desktop (Mac), or a Coolpix window opens (Windows 98) on the Windows desktop.
If you open up the Coolpix folder, you're presented with a window of thumbnails... double-clicking on one brings up the full-sized version. If you want to download photos, you just select them and drag them to where you want to them go. And that's all NikonView does, though it does it well. Winner:
Olympus C-3030Z |
