I am looking for a camera to use for an on-line snowboarding magazine. I have been looking a the Nikon Coolpix 950 and the like the fact that you can also purchase a Fisheye lens or a wide angle lens as an extra lens. Is Nikon the only camera that offers add on lenses? Also does anybody know if the 950 offers burst shooting. If so, how many frames per second can it fire? Thanks.

-- Andreas Herr (andreas@kindsnow.com), December 22, 1999

Answers

Remember that the lenses that you are referring to are screw-on lenses not true interchangable lenses. But given that, there are many other consumer digicams that you can thread on teleconveters.

-- Micheal F. Kelly (radiant@removethis.gci.net), December 22, 1999.

Olympus has a fair range of optional lenses for their digicams as well. There are a number of third-party auxiliary lenses as well that fit various cameras. (Try www.bugeyedigital.com for a number of third-party lenses.) The camera mfr's lenses will be higher quality, but the third- party stuff at least works. I second the comment about the these being auxiliary lenses, not primary ones, as with SLRs. The image quality will degrade somewhat in all cases.

As to the 950's burst capabilities, we reported on this in our review. It's 1.5 frames per second at full resolution, 2 frames per second in VGA mode.

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), January 03, 2000.