Hi

Just bought the Nikon Coolpix s9100, with 18x optical zoom and 12Mpx for general purpose use. Here's a few pics of my first test runs. I thought the subject matter might be of interest...

All shots resized from the original 4000x3000px.

Up close and personal :


From nearly a kilometer and a half away :






The Airbus is roughly a mile / 2kms away :


From my balcony, roughly 1000m :


Cropped :


It's no expensive spotting gear, as you can tell by the quality, but I was pleasantly surprised by the long shots capacity for that price range and size. Picture quality decreases proportionally with luminosity (that night shot is horrible) but for taking 'souvenir' or family pics at close to mid-range in daylight, which is what I bought it for, it's doing a pretty good job IMO.

Cheers

Nico

nice shots!,

i ended up buying a $100 16MP Canon w/ only 5x Zoom, and I'm regretting it with every picture i take, Next time its 16-20X Zoom or not at all.

Nice shots - impressive for a p&s.

There's always a trade-off: size vs. zoom. More zoom usually means a much larger camera, so it's not as convenient to haul around, and if you don't have a camera with you, you'll miss every shot, not just the ones that need zoom. But if hauling around a larger camera isn't a problem, the zoom is always nice to have.

It is indeed significantly bigger than cameras with lesser zooms, but still small enough to be carried around in a pocket. It also powers up in about a second and a half from dark to picture-ready, which is very convenient when time matters. Though it'll still show details too minute to see with the naked eye (the reg. number on the Rossiya), quality decreases significantly at high zoom levels, partly due to the AF which struggles at times and the slightest shake making the pictures a blurry mess and rendering it useless past a certain range. It still gives decent results at up to 150/200m :




All in all, I find it very well balanced, and don't regret the purchase one bit. Now to learn to stop shaking to get crisper images

Cheers

Nico

This is exactly the right aproach for using a point&shoot and will pretty much guarantuee you will have fun with it. As for the shaking, make sure you rather use the optical VR (stabilizer) than the digital one. In good lighting conditions, the higher end Coolpix S like yours should not create too much blur.