I, like many others, am trying to decide between the Nikon Coolpix 950 and the Olympus C-2000Z. Unlike most of the other posts I've found here, however, I have specific questions about the functioning of each camera that I hope hope will help determine the trade-off of each. I hope users of each camera will respond with their experences.

I will be using the camera primarily to document artwork and live theatre. So ability to reproduce color and handle very high-contrast subjects are my primary concerns. Most images will be kept/distributed electronically, but I will do some printing.

1) Color saturation and clarity. I prefer (subjectively) the coloration in the C2K test shots. This would be enough for me to decide, except I suspect it is somewhat the result of in-camera sharpening. The CP950 has an "image adjust" feature. Has anyone used it? Does it work? Will it produce the brighter, more saturated colors I observed in the C2K test shots?

2) IR Remote. I will be doing a fair amount of tripod work. Has anyone actually experenced camera-jiggle problems with the Nikon, or is this something that merely requires care to prevent?

3) White Balance. This is (obviously) paramont to proper color reproduction. Has anyone experienced difficulty with either camera in this regard? The Nikon's manual white balance is intruiging. Has anyone used it? To what effect? (I am interested in "true" white balancing, not F/X)

4) Aperture Priority Mode. How limiting are the Nikon's 3 pre-set apertures? Is control over depth of field significantly reduced?

5) Manual Focus. How useful are the Nikon's 10 focal lengths? Or the other way, how limiting are the Olympus' 2?

6) Contrast. Does anyone have experence working with very high contrast subjects. I am concerned with loss of background detail in this situation, and couldn't determine much from the test shots.

7) Lens Speed. The Olympus is described as having a very "fast lens". I admit I don't know what this means or (more importantly) how it affects the final picture. Could someone explain it please.

Thank you for your time and a

-- Kirk Markley (nkm@phoenix.net), August 01, 1999

Answers

I don't have all the answers or the time to give great detail, but concerning the CP950 :

I used Image Adjust to compensate for white on white images or blk on blk that he camera wanted to make grey on grey. It worked fine.

Camera movement on a tripod was solved by the self timer.

Auto white balance seemed to work quite well. I didn't experiment with different temperatures of light such as you will encounter in theatre lighting. Overall the camera tended toward blue, but it was global and easily corrected.

It was noticeably less sharp stopped down all the way, but very sharp otherwise and a reasonable 5.2 meg tiff, kinda slow at that rez....

I didn't need the manual focus, Multispot worked great as did the matrix metering, Nikon has this down cold...lots of experience in manufacturing. The macro capability is astounding. The Kodak DCS265 Zoom sucked in all of the above depts.

I hope this helps. I was doing catalog work on a white sweep, not very similar to your intended usage...t

-- tom meyer (jparady@mindsping.com), August 05, 1999.

The nikon uses compact flash while the the olymous uses smartmedia. To me this is a serious disadvantage as smartmedia is limited to 64mb compaed to 128 for compact flash. If I were you i would wait another couple of months before purchasing.

-- Nick bart (r.bartlett@xtra.co.nz), August 13, 1999.