Nikon Coolpix 4300 Review
The chief designer at Nikon must have very small hands. And a good manicurist. With your right hand holding the moulded grip on the right of the body your fingernails are perpetually scraping the lens barrel. It doesn’t damage the camera, your nails or your photographic results in any way but it’s just annoying.
And it could put you in a poor frame of mind for judging the rest of this camera’s design. Even the most forgiving users are going to agree that the grey rubberised finish of the buttons on the backplate is unappealing, and that the four-way navipad feels generally stiff and ‘dead’. However, it’s a body shape that Nikon has been using for some time (in its Coolpix 880, 885 and 775), so it must be popular.
Nikon Coolpix 4300 Photographic results
And that’s a great pity, because the first set of shots you take with this camera reveal that it’s a cracker. The lens and the 3.3-megapixel CCD in the outgoing 885 model seemed little better or worse than those in any number of other 3.3-megapixel digital cameras, but the swap to a 4-megapixel CCD in the 4300 has changed all that. Indeed, despite the higher 5MP resolution of the Coolpix 5700, the 4300 produces the crisper shots.
We know what you’re thinking: maybe the 4300 uses some kind of super-aggressive in-camera sharpening that also brings unwanted noise and edge effects? Not as far as we can see. Indeed, you can run a Sharpen filter over the 4300’s images and make them that little bit crisper still without the image edges breaking up unduly.
This outright image quality makes the Nikon’s handling problems even harder to bear. You have to shift your right hand away from the optimum gripping position to get your index finger on the shutter release. Whether it’s this, or the button’s fairly heavy action, we don’t know, but we got more camera shake with the Nikon than with any of the other cameras on test. Bright light won’t pose any problems, but when the shutter speeds fall to 1/60sec or below, you could face problems – camera shake will creep in before the Nikon’s auto-ISO function starts ramping up the CCD sensitivity.
Round the back of the camera, things aren’t a lot better. The optical viewfinder does the job, but it’s not especially big and the same can be said for the 1.6-inch LCD. It’s crisp and responsive, though, and lacks the alarming reddish hue of the Coolpix 885. It needs to be good, mind, because the lack of a separate mono LCD status panel (more and more digital cameras are dropping these now) means that you’ll rely on it for all the Nikon’s various settings and photographic options. And because this is a pretty sophisticated camera, there are a lot of settings.
The main mode dial is pretty straightforward to use, and hints at how this camera’s controls have been categorised for different types of user. In auto mode, for example, you don’t need to do anything except point the camera and shoot.
The scene mode’s guite interesting. Most digital cameras have a small selection of scene settings for portraits, night shots, landscapes and the like, but the bracket for white balance and use Nikon’s clever Best Shot Selector. Using the latter, the camera keeps taking shots for as long as your finger presses the shutter release, then compares them all for sharpness and saves only the sharpest to the memory card, which is handy, given the
Coolpix 4300 has no fewer than 12. These include portrait, party/indoor, night portrait, beach/snow, landscape, sunset… the list goes on. With each of these settings, the focusing, white balance, saturation and exposure are carefully set to match that specific subject. The scene modes offer an element of photographic control that is missing in simple point-and-shoot mode, but without requiring any real photographic knowledge.
We have to say, though, that even with its 12 scene modes, Nikon Coolpix 4300 can’t come close to matching the amazing Casio QV-R4, which offers 33 scene modes, each with attractive thumbnail representations, brief notes/instructions and the ability to add your own modes.
Scene modes are all very well, but keen photographers will want to keep a much closer tab on what the camera is actually doing, and that’s where the manual mode comes in. You can use the 4300 for point-and-shoot photography in this mode, plus you can apply exposure compensation, auto-bracket on your shots, controls, the Coolpix 4300 really is a very good digital camera. But it all comes down to the handling and ergonomics, and this is where it starts to get very subjective.
Tagged with: 4300 • camera • coolpix • Nikon
Filed under: Nikon
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