Nikon COOLPIX 4300 Digital Camera [4MP 3xOptical]

Product Information

The Coolpix 4300 offers an interesting Image Adjustment menu, with a wide variety of options, letting you adjust contrast, lightness, and color. The Coolpix 4300 performed well on our "laboratory" resolution test chart. It started showing artifacts in the test patterns at resolutions as low as 800 lines per picture height in both vertical and horizontal directions. I found "strong detail" out to about 1,050 lines per picture height in the vertical direction, and about 1,100 lines horizontally. "Extinction" of the target patterns occurred about 1,300 lines.

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Image viewing is done on its 1.5 inch TFT LCD screen, and Type 1 CompactFlash (CF) cards are its storage medium. It was designed to be powered by a rechargeable EN-EL1 lithium ion battery, but it also accepts the non-rechargeable 6V 2CR5/DL245 lithium battery. It weighs about 7.9 ounces without the battery or CF card, and its components are housed inside a body sized at 3.7 × 2.7 × 2.0 inches. The COOLPIX 4300, which was released in September 2002 and designed as a sister camera of high-end COOLPIX series 950 to 4500 of which a distinctive swivel design enabling the lens to point anywhere you want got many attentions, has almost all features of the high-end camera like exposure compensation and manual exposure although it has a scene mode convenient for a novice. As the screen size of the COOLPIX lens is small and many shots are taken with the maximum aperture, the high optical performance is needed. Not to mention designing, the high product quality at production deserves the Nikkor. The COOLPIX 4300 has only two aperture stops, the maximum and minimum. A part of the reason why there are only two aperture stops is that the sufficient depth of field can be obtained even with the maximum aperture as described before. Another reason is an effect of light diffraction. This is my ultimate "resolution shot," given the infinite range of detail in a natural scene like this, and the Coolpix 4300 performs very well. The tree limbs over the roof and fine foliage in front of the house show excellent detail, with strong definition in the leaf patterns and branch details. The image is pretty sharp corner to corner, with just a hint of the corner softness that plagues many consumer digicam lenses. The camera loses detail in the bright white paint surrounding the bay window, a trouble spot for many digicams. At the same time, the shadow area above the front door shows moderate detail but a fair bit of image noise, pointing to a somewhat limited dynamic range. The Auto white balance produces good color, though exposure is a bit contrasty. The table below shows a standard resolution and quality series, followed by ISO and sharpness series.Most accurate color with the Manual white balance option, but better than average with Auto. A good performance. Slightly low flash power, with a range closer to 8 feet in our tests than the 12 feet of Nikon's specs. is a case where a performance on the edge is not on a par with the one of the micro lens, so please make sure to take some trial shots in a case of precise reproduction. Moreover, this macro photography brings about an advantage that the close-up photography is taken readily with the deep depth of filed as described in the foregoing. I routinely shoot this series of images to show the field of view for each camera, with the lens at full wide angle, at maximum telephoto ( 3x, in this case), and at full telephoto with the digital zoom enabled. The Coolpix 3500's lens is equivalent to a 38-114mm zoom on a 35mm camera. That corresponds to a moderate wide angle to a moderate telephoto. Following are the results at each zoom setting.

User manual Nikon Coolpix 4300 (English - 77 pages)

All in all though, a very capable camera for low light shooting. The table below shows the best exposure we were able to obtain for each of a range of illumination levels. Images in this table (like all of our sample photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the camera.As another example, Fig.2 shows a lens of the COOLPIX SQ. In a spiral type lens like the SQ, the focusing group as the group 1 is moved by the electric cum and the macro photography is realized by using the surplus lens movement amount of the group 1 available in-between the wide angle and the telephoto. Although the lens of the COOLPIX 4300 is f/2.8 on the wide angle side which is a fast speed lens in the film camera, it can render the picture in acceptably sharp focus all over from the close to the far distances even when taken with the maximum aperture. What is a big difference between a 135-type film camera and the compact digital camera like the COOLPIX ? In a word, it comes down to the fact that the screen size is small. This shot is always a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability, given the strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs used for the lighting. The Coolpix 4300's Manual white balance clearly produced the best color, but its Auto option did much better than average. ( Incandescent really had trouble though.) Marti's skin tone is pretty good here, and even the always-difficult blue flowers turned out pretty well. Here again, quite a bit of exposure compensation was needed, as the camera's default exposure produced very dark images. (All the shots at right were snapped with an exposure boost of +1.3 EV.)