My First Digital Camera

In 2004, I wanted to take up photography again — and I wanted to "go digital", really digital, i.e., fully electronic rather than mechanic. Our kids both had started with Nikon Coolpix 775 cameras (2.1 MP, 3x zoom lens, equivalent to 38 - 115 mm "normal" focal length), back in summer 2002, and they were happily taking pictures. Coming from a (now unused) Nikon F3, I was looking for something "higher up", but hesitated spending lots of money on something that I had no experience with. Somehow, I found the looks of the Nikon Coolpix 5700 appealing (a conventional camera with parts of the body cut off). That camera was introduced in summer 2003, at a price of CHF 1600.-; in January 2004, when I saw a new one on sale in an on-line auction for just under CHF 1200.- (which I thought was a reasonable price) I went for it.

In the aftermath, this was a mistake, of course (no experience yet with on-line auctions!!) — not because I had been cheated dramatically, but this was a shop owner selling off his stock because newer and better models were lurking around the corner (and came out a couple months later). And of course I hadn't tried it out — but at that time this would not have helped because I did not have anything to compare with, nor had I even ever used our offspring's cameras. The latter would not have helped either, because the Coolpix 775 had an optical viewfinder, the Coolpix 5700 does not. Here are my findings and the camera's features:

• 5 MP sensor, 8x zoom lens (equivalent to 35 - 280 mm "normal" focal length), plus 4x "digital zoom" (i.e., built-in cropping, hardly usable), minimum distance 3 cm for macro photography;  shutter speed up to 1/4000 s;
• An absolutely tiny, 1.5" (stamp-size), 100'000 pixel flip-out LCD in the back — ridiculous by current terms;
• An equally bad, 180'000 pixel electronic viewfinder — unusable for serious manual focusing, hardly usable in low light conditions (and no optical viewfinder to help out!);
• Zoom speed was OK, but focusing could take seconds — one had to be patient with this camera! If you were not used to it you were likely to take a photo before the lens was in focus — whomever I handed the camera (for a quick a shot with me on it) fell into this trap, and the tiny screen or the viewfinder were hardly suited to indicate how much out-of-focus a picture was.
• Needless to say: in low light conditions that performance was limited
• I had the original 32 MB (unusably small!) SD card, as well as a bigger 512 MB card — enough to keep any single day's production and more, assuming JPEG (see below, I took my laptop along on trips and offloaded the photos every evening);
• The built-in flash was OK, but hardly suited for good results (limited power, always pointing forward);
• Finally, I'm notoriously bad at reading manuals (i.e., I rarely ever do!), an so inevitably I found myself in situations where the camera insisted on popping out the flash where I did not want tit, or conversely, where it refused to turn on the flash where I really wanted — because I managed to maneuver myself (i.e., the camera) into odd "locations" in the menu settings, or by inadvertently pressing an inappropriate button; similarly, when I wanted to take a macro shot, I had forgotten how to switch to macro mode, and the camera would not focus at all ... :(
• On the bright side, that camera was compact and light (500 g), easy to carry along on trips!

Despite all this, I made some very reasonable photos with this camera; the viewfinder shortcomings did not seem all that bad initially — after all, coming from analog photography I was not used to seeing and checking the results immediately after taking the shots anyway! At least in good lighting conditions I could not blame the camera for doing a bad job — here's a shot from my office window into the garden in mid-winter, showing a pretty good dynamic range:

Our garden in Uster / ZH, in winter
Nikon Coolpix 5700, ISO 100, f/6.4 1/319, 10mm (39mm equiv.)

Overall, the camera did some 1300 - 1400 shots in our hands, covering the following key events:

• The Air '04, a military air show in Payerne, VD (51 photos, a challenge for the autofocus!)
• Walk around the Greifensee near Zurich (39 photos)
• May 2005: Southern France: Avignon, Marseille, Arles, and Tarascon (300 photos)
• July 2005: Finland / Finnmark: Porvoo, Helsinki, Hvitträsk, Sipoo, the Finnmark/NO, Lakselv, Kakslauttanen, Kaunispää, Varangerfjorden / Nesseby, Niilanpää - Kiilopää, and Rovaniemi (477 Photos)
• In August 2008, Lea also took the camera to the Hessenpark and Darmstadt, Germany (72 photos)

Particularly on the trips to Southern France and Finland, the Coolpix 5700 served its purpose well — yet after less than 2 years it was clear to me that I wanted to return to a "real" camera, i.e., a DSLR: the electronic viewfinder, the slow focus, the somewhat cumbersome menu system (i.e., the need to study a manual!?) all drove me away from this camera. My DSLR arrived in spring 2006 (to be discussed in a future blog); I kept the 5700 for a while (see above), but 2009 it developed a serious problem — Nikon replaced the sensor at no charge (even though the warranty had long expired). However, soon thereafter the camera was left attached to the USB port, and the battery was drained completely — this caused new damage: zooming only worked towards the far(tele)  end,  to return to wide angles one needed to turn off and back on the camera — not really practical! In the end I was fed up with it and sold it as defective, for CHF 34, at an on-line auction.

At that time I was using Apple's iPhoto for managing the pictures; iPhoto then did not read the RAW format from a Coolpix 5700, and I wanted to avoid an extra conversion step for importing, so I was taking pictures in JPEG format — not lossless, of course,  but at least that saved me from having to add a 1 GB or bigger memory card (these cards were expensive, after all). I have since consequently switched to using RAW format only.