Nikon COOLPIX 4300 Digital Camera [4MP 3xOptical]

Product Information

Overall results are similar to the wider shot above, and the Coolpix 4300's 3x zoom lens helps prevent distortion of Marti's features. Detail is outstanding, with very sharp details in Marti's face and hair. (Probably more detail here than Marti would care to see, which is why I don't show it to her 1:1 on screen;-) The shot at right was taken at the default exposure setting, which is just a little bright, but loses only the brightest highlights. Detail is strong in the shadow areas, with moderately low noise. An excellent job.

Nikon | Download center | COOLPIX S4300 Nikon | Download center | COOLPIX S4300

Generally, the aberration of the lens is reduced as the lens is being stopped down, so many of the lenses render their optimum performance when the lens is a little bit stopped down from the maximum aperture. In the lens of the COOLPIX, however, the screen size is small and the required resolving power is quite high, so the definition contrarily falls off when the lens is stopped down. This is the reason why the COOLPIX lens has no other aperture stops such as f/16 and f/22. Excellent low-light performance: Great color balance, fairly low noise, but no AF assist light, and no distance readout in manual focus mode.Resolution is very high, and details are sharp throughout the frame. Shadow detail is fairly strong, with fairly low noise. The Coolpix 4300's optical viewfinder is very tight, showing only about 81 percent of the frame at wide angle, and about 79 percent at telephoto. The LCD monitor is much more accurate, showing approximately 98 percent accuracy at wide angle and telephoto. Given that I like LCD monitors to be as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the Coolpix 4300's LCD monitor performs well here, but the optical viewfinder leaves a good bit to be desired. Flash distribution is fairly even at wide angle, with just slight falloff at the corners and edges of the frame. At telephoto, flash distribution is more uniform, but dimmer.

Nikon Coolpix 4300 review: Nikon Coolpix 4300 - CNET

In the 135-type film camera, the values of depth of field are obtained by defining the smallest permissible diameter of the circle of confusion (that is a limit to the smallness of detail which the eye can perceive) as 1/30mm. When the depth of field of the COOLPIX is calculated with the same definition from the ratio of the screen size, the depth becomes deep approximately by the ratio of the 135-type film camera to the screen size though a detailed explanation is omitted herein. The rough ratio of the screen size is calculated by dividing the focal length of the 135-type film camera converted from the one of the COOLPIX by the real focal length. The focal length of the COOLPIX 4300 is equivalent to 38 - 115mm in the 135-type film camera although the real focal length thereof is 8 - 24mm, so the ratio of the screen size is 4.8 times, namely, the depth of field is 4.8 times deeper in comparison with the zoom lens 38 - 115mm of the 135-type film camera. To put it in other way, we can get the depth of field to the same extent that a lens of f/2.8 is stopped down to f/13 and the f/4.9 lens is down to f/24, too. *1 Gavin has over 30 year experience of writing about photography and television. He is currently the editor of British Photographic Industry News, and previously served as editor of Which Digital Camera and deputy editor of Total Digital Photography. Optical distortion on the Coolpix 4300 is about average (which is nonetheless too high in my opinion) at the wide-angle end, where I measured approximately 0.8 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared a little better, where I measured a 0.2 percent pincushion distortion. Chromatic aberration is moderate, showing only about three pixels of coloration on either side of the target lines in the corners of the image. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.)The Coolpix 4300 turned out to be an excellent low light performer, capturing bright, clear images all the way down to the 1/16 foot-candle (0.67 lux) limit of my test, even at ISO 100. (This is quite dark, only 1/16th as bright as typical city streetlighting at night.) Its full manual exposure control,maximum exposure time of 1 minute in "bulb" mode, and functional noise reduction system make for great low-light photos. The one limitation is that there's neither an autofocus assist lamp nor a numeric readout on the manual-focus distance scale. It can thus be a little problematic achieving accurate focus under low light conditions. Save some room in your budget for a reasonably large CompactFlash Type I card to replace the 16MB "starter" card that Nikon includes.