I’ve been looking for a new digital camera for quite some time now and saw that the Minolta A200 is now going for ~$650. I was getting ready to order the damn thing when I noticed that there’s a rebate for the Nikon Coolpix 8800 and while it’s about $100 more, it’s got enough cool features to cause me to seriously look at it.
However, going over the specs and etc., I’m going nuts trying to decide between the two.
Does anyone have experience with one or both of the cameras? The price between the two is irrelevant to me - if the Nikon is a better camera, I’m willing to pay the money, but I’m not going to consider any other cameras.
So, here’s what I gather for the two cameras:
M: 28-200mm manual zoom.
N: 35-350mm mechanical zoom.
The Nikon’s looking better so far. Both have anti-shake built in and appear to work equally well. The manual zoom part seems a lot more useful to me though. I don’t know that having an extra 7mm on the wide end makes up for the extra 150 on the zoom side.
M: Ring focus on lens barrel with distances marked in the EVF. Magnification to check focus. Autofocus seems to work well, but has problems in low light (as autofocus systems are wont to do).
N: Goofy-ass system where you hold down a button on the lens barrel with your left hand and work a dial with your right thumb. No distances marked or shown. I’ve read that this is a problem at night and reviews seem to differ as to how the focus works (huh? Didn’t they use the camera?), but apparently there’s a system whereby the camera “snaps” to the correct focus. Autofocus seems to be slow in general. Combined with a potentially poor manual focus, this seems to be problemmatic.
M: Relatively quick cycle speeds between frames. Standard sort of burst mode. 10 fps for 4 seconds of Muybridge-style shots.
N: Cool feature where the camera takes 5 shot bursts and chooses the best based on focus or exposure. Apparently, this causes some ridiculous delay times as the buffer clears. Apparently, this camera is also slow to write to the memory, especially if there’s still something in the buffer. “Muybridge Mode” with 100 shots over 3 seconds.
M: Very accurate color reproduction (apparently the best ever). Of course, this means boring results. There are settings to affect the saturation.
N: A little overblown, but standard for digital cameras. This appears to naturally add more contrast and therefore “sharpness” to the images than the A200, but since I’ll be using PS on the photos I want to keep, I don’t know if this is really a factor (especially with the option to increase saturation on the A200).
Sharpness poses a bit of a problem. The Nikon seems to take better shots of the test pattern, but the Minolta’s macro really beats the Nikon. Of course, the test pics I’ve seen appear to be taken on different days, so there’s a lot of variation between environmental factors in outdoor shots.
M: much less noise than the Nikon on the test images I’ve seen and an apparently unusable 800speed setting. However, the noise appears to be more pronounced on the M even in those same test settings.
N: the increased contrast tends to wipe out detail in shadows that the M would otherwise capture.
Battery life seems to be equal.
Minolta seems to have a better movie mode, but since I don’t plan to be making hommemade pornos, it’s a nonissue.
In the end, it appears that it really comes down to how awful the autofocus of the Nikon really is and the speed issue vs. the shorter zoom and the potential sharpness problems of the Minolta.
The sharpness sounds like it’s a matter of five seconds with Photoshop, but the focus of the Nikon may mean missed shots…
FWIW, I can’t find a local store that has them to compare, plus I don’t know how well working with them in the store would factor into it.
The forums I’ve read are fairly helpless, mainly because the Nikon people tend to be full of themselves (that is, amateurs buying their first Nikon and suddenly thinking that they’re technical experts and Ansel Adams to boot). The Minolta posts tend to be people who were made fun of by the Nikon people and don’t appear to know how to use Photoshop.
Any thoughts?