I am interested in the Nikon Coolpix 800, and tried your Imaging Resource "Comparometer". I chose the Canon S10 (another I might go to instead of the Nikon) on one side, and the Nikon Coolpix 800 on the other. I chose the 'outdoor' picture with the woman holding the flowers, then the 'test box' pictures. I was surprised to see that the Canon S10 seemed to show much better detail on the woman's head/hair then the Nikon, and that the Canon had MUCH better white colors on the test box.. with the Nikon's looking grey to me). Am I missing something, or is the Cannon S10 that much better?

Finally, I called Nikon to try to find out something about reliability of the Coolpix 800 (number sold, number returned etc). Nikon was unable (or unwilling) to give me any details. Anywhere I can go to find out that kind of info before I buy??

Thanks,

John O'Brien

-- John O'Brien (job4iac@aol.com), July 15, 2000

Answers

Its not accurate for Nikon to just blurt out numbers and have you surmise as to the reliability of the product. I work part time for CompUSA and constantly meet people incapable of operating computers properly . They then blame the company (us) or the product we sell (Sony, Olympus, Compaq) when in reality its their fault and they refuse read the manual. For Nikon to say "we sold 5000 and had 400 returned" would be pointless, almost all hardware we take back, at least 85% is non-defective. So I see why Nikon doesn't want to talk, how many returns you recieved is not indicative of a good or bad product, you can make very few assumptions based on returns. Lastly, I doubt Nikon has people on their customer service line that have detailed access to that kind of information. Unfortunatley, most vendors I speak with are very unhappy that everyone demands computers and technology so cheap these days, the first thing to get kicked off the budgets by these companies is tech support and customer service. As for the cameras, I think the Nikon is a great camera as is the Canon. It's my experience that the only thing Canon can build is cameras, their computer perhiperals are horrible, printers and scanner made by them are low quality. Nikon usually doesn't let people down in terms of quality. I had to laugh when I saw the new ad for the Canon 8200, "built by the only company who knows a thing or two about photography", an obvious jab at Epson. Of course Epson builds superior printers to Canon so their logic is just a bit flawed...

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), July 15, 2000.

John , don't take that post personally, it may sound a bit abrasive but its the truth about why you can't get good information these days. I wasn't implying in any way that YOU are incapable of operating equipment, its that you wouldn't believe some of the people who I meet and their stories.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), July 15, 2000.

I'm with Cris in terms of saying that you can't evaluate a product based on the number of returns. There are too many reasons people return products. You could make a case for evaluating something based on the repair to sales ratio... The problem is that no one is going to give you those numbers unless they are ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE they aren't going to have a negative impact on their sales -or they're complete idiots...

What you might do instead is check out a few places on the web that allow consumers to post reviews. I throw out the best and worst of those and figure what remains is probably a fair general assessment of the problems one might expect with a certain unit. I also make the possibly unfair assumption that the total number of reports(both good and bad) is indicative of the share of the market that's held when compared against the number of reports concerning similar models. I do discount large volumes of similar complaints when comparing overall reviews to get a market share guesstimate. It's crude and doubtlessly inaccurate, but if it's all you have to go on...

Try www.dcforum.com They have 47 user reviews for the Coolpix 800. You can read 'em all or just the ones whose ratings interest you.

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), July 16, 2000.

Buy the camera at a place that has a 30 day get your money back, no conditions guaranteed, keep the receipt.

Try the camera every day and download images every day.

Check them out with the best software you can get.

Don't trust the images you saw online. Despite where they came from. The images could have been changed in sofware, adjusted in colors or detail. Or one camera might have taken the picture in a finer quality mode then the other one.

The only real test, is from hands on experience.

-- Jeff Epstein (npspam@noemail.com), July 16, 2000.