Comments about Nikon Nikon Black 13.5 Megapixel COOLPIX Digital Camera:

I've been using my p6000 for a few days and tought I'd share some of my positive impressions. First off, I've never owned a DSLR and my experience comes from Sony P/S camera's.

I bought this camera primarily because it reminds me of the Canon G9 that I tried briefly and liked because it had lots of nice buttons and was easy for me to operate without using the LCD screen. What I like about it over the G9 is it is actually a better weight. Solid enough to get my hands around, and light enough to use single handedly. Another big plus is the built-in GPS. Since most of my photos are taken on trips this is very useful and so far works as advertised.

I even used the p6000 with GPS from a plane to trace a recent flight path in what one could call "breadcrumb mode". I just shot some pics periodically out of the plane window and when I viewed them on Googlemaps, I had my flight path.

I can understand the negative comments from a photographer's perspective and if you look at the images with high magnification you will see problems but as a traveller's camera this is looking like a great choice. It's light, does all the essentials, pretty easy to learn and you don't need to have a camera bag to lug around.

I love the panorama assist mode, and along with Panorama Maker (included) the results need very little tweaking.

I also like the Digital Zoom options which should be renamed "Artificial Zoom". I don't use the "scaling" method for I think obvious reasons, but I do like the "croping" method. I've set my preferred picture size to 3 megapixels, and the camera then uses the remaining unused pixels (its a 13 megapixel sensor) to "zoom in" by croping in. This is essentially what I used to do when the telephoto wasn't long enough to capture wildlife. Instead of my having to shoot at 13 megapixels and remembering to later crop the photo in Photoshop, the camera handles this for me.

Nikon's RAW file codec isn't ready yet (website says to check back soon), but in the mean time Adobe's Camera Raw plugin 4.6 can read the p6000 NRW files.