Some ideas for Nikon's Japanese development team:

1) If the camera is in macro mode and flash is enabled and there's not enough light to autofocus, turn on the red eye reduction light and use it as a focus assist light.

2) Do your best to allow the maximum possible sequence length at full resolution on the Coolpix 990. Instead of storing RGB data, consider using raw JPEG data in the buffer. Lossless compression could also be used, but would results would depend on image content, so it might be difficult to document.

3) Add a "super continuous" mode that allows you to shoot continuously for as long as you want. When the buffer is full, throw away the first frame and use that space for the new frame. This would be great for sports action photography and should be easy to implement.

4) Show a tiny histogram on the screen where you discard/accept a photo. The histogram doesn't need to be very large as long as you can get some idea of how good the exposure was. (32 pixels wide and 16 pixels high should be plenty.)

5) Focus assist with external flash. This would require additional hardware, but maybe a redesigned ES-900 could be used. Plug it into the flash connector and USB at the same time and update the firmware on the 990 to turn on focus assist through the USB bus.

These do not need to answers, although of course I would be delighted if you like the ideas. I know that #5 is very unlikely to happen - we probably need a new digital flash standard and that will have to wait for the next generation of cameras. Something like firewire might be fast enough to trigger and squelch the flash in real time. (USB is probably too slow.)

-- Juri Munkki (jmunkki@cameraid.com), March 23, 2000

Answers

Thank you Juri.

I will forward these to our engineers in Japan.

The 990 reflects the Vox Populi - we added many features after suggestions (aka complaints) that were voiced on the web-just as we did from the 900 to the 950. (Vox Populi-spelling-I never studied Latin-or as Dan Quayle once put it-Latin America? I don't speak Latin) Michael

-- Mike Rubin, Product Marketing Manager, Nikon Inc. (web@imaging-resource.com), March 23, 2000.

Great ideas. I especially like #3. That would be incredibly useful. For when you KNOW something ruthless is about to happen, and you don't want to trust your reflexes. That would be one of those features that 35mm cameras can never implement.

-- Defiler (defiler@null.net), March 23, 2000.