Not so cool

Author's Rating:

Pros: Takes pictures without much delay

Cons: Chronic red eye, out of focus half the time, fuzzy pictures.

The Bottom Line: 

You will get fuzzy pictures with red eye. Don't bother, not worth it.

Author's Review
I have spent about 1 month now with my Coolpix P90. I have taken about 2,000 photos in every condition I can muster to try it out and to give you the most information possible with my experience. Unfortunately, I have made a bad purchase. Let me give you some background, I am moving from a 10 year old film camera over to digital and I am trying to keep the same quality of film, while using a digital camera. I am an automatic guy. I just want to take a photo and have it turn out right w/o me having to focus or perform any settings. I am not pleased with this product and here is why:

1. The camera does not understand how to automatically focus on a subject.

For example, I have my daughter standing 10 feet back in front of me with her positioned in the middle picture and the camera chooses to focus on the countertop behind her. If you have multiple subjects standing in front of you, the camera doesn't understand that you want all of them in focus....so it will pick one or two and focus on them, and then leave the rest out of focus, even if they are within a few feet of one and other. This is my biggest gripe and the reason why 1/2 of the photos I take have been unusable. The auto focus on this is horrid; the facial recognition is essentially nonexistent. I am not an engineer, but this seems to be the most basic fundamental requirement of any camera for the past 30 years and Nikon sure missed the mark on this.

2. Horrible red eye - even with red eye reduction turned on, about 15% of all of my photos have red eye.

A bizarre thing I have noticed a lot is that on my subjects one of their eyes will be red the other eye will be black. I don't understand why this is the case or how this could even happen, but it does. Another thing I have noticed is when you have multiple subjects, one or two will have red eyes and the others will not, making the entire picture useless. I have never seen red eye before in my 10 year old film camera and find it ridiculous that this newer technology on the P90 has red eye, and consistent red eye for that fact. This just doesn't make any sense to me. I know, I can buy software, blah blah blah, but who wants to hassle? I just want to take a picture and have the camera do what it is supposed to do.

3. When having my digital photos developed, they lack the brilliance and crisp results I would expect.

The images are so soft. For example, the hair on my daughter's head appears to be blended together as if I am watching standard definition television. While at the same time, getting my film photos developed at the same place yield cleaner more defined results. The hair on my daughter's head using my film camera is as I would see them in real life (or I guess you can relate them to high definition). I have taken many taken pictures side by side and they don't compare. About the old time I can get them to compare is when I am in brilliant daylight or considerable indoor light. I am using the maximum quality setting, BTW.

4. The flash does not pop up automatically, before you take pictures, you have to click a separate button to pop up the flash. If you don't do that, your photo will not be useable.

I hope this helps you understand what you are getting before you drop your hard earned money to get it. I cannot recommend to you what you should get as I only have this one to compare. Best of luck to you, bottom line, I just hope you don't lose your money as I have.