That Old Camera

Since I started thinking about getting motivated I also started thinking about my old cameras. One in particular was my first digital camera. It is a Nikon CoolPix 995. I is 3.34 megapixal which is pretty much unheard of now. I was pretty pleased with it when I first got it however as I tried to get it to do more it started to show it's short comings. Shutter lag. It makes action shots of any kind problematic. You have to stick to the lower iso's because it has such a small sensor. Otherwise the pictures start to take on noise. I took it out to try this morning after dusting it off and charging the battery. I set it to the highest quality (tiff format) took a picture, and waited.        and waited.     and waited. At least 30-45 seconds to load the image to the card. I will stick with fine (jpeg) from now on. Much faster. The camera has it's advantages. It has a swivel design between the lens housing and camera body. So taking photographs low down or high up is pretty easy. The macro mode works pretty well even though the focusing is slow. I put in an old 512 meg card I found in a drawer and it will hold 320 photos in jpeg fine. The battery in it won't hold a charge in it for that many pictures so I don't think I ever have to worry about filling the card. 

I decided to use this to get my picture for today. I went out in the front yard this morning to try out the macro feature on it.
I think I am going to keep it dusted off and the battery charged. There may well be times I can use it when my dslr might be awkward. There may also be times when I just want to take it out and fiddle with it.