Nikon COOLPIX P300 12.2 CMOS Digital Camera with 4.2x f/1.8 NIKKOR Wide-Angle Optical Zoom Lens and Full HD 1080p Video (Black)

Europe trip 2011. I had to decide whether or not to bring my Nikon D90, Canon 7D....or buy a little point and shoot that might be easier to carry around. Well about a week before I left for Europe, my friend over there had his D90 stolen....SO, I opted for the Point and Shoot. After much research online I decided on the Nikon P300. It was the best decision I could have made. I'm a photographer by trade, and the images coming from this camera are pretty amazing. Everyone else I travelled with stopped using their cameras after a while and we just used the P300 because the pics were so much better (Crisper images, better in low light (no flash needed), nice wide angle lens, etc, etc).It also shoots decent video - Not great, but decent. The video looks great on the little 3" screen but once I played it through HDMI to my 46" TV at home, didn't hold up quite as great. Video quality is no where near a Canon 7D or similar, but still for under $300 it's more than I expected. And again in low light, it still looks great.My favorite thing about this camera is that I almost never had to use the flash - even at night. It performs on par to a DSLR's low light abilities (yes a bit more grainy, but still quite usable (super fast lens 1.8 I believe). I can't say enough good things about this camera. It's the first point and shoot I actually enjoy using. It's menus are simple, it's easy to use. Ultra compact - fits in your pocket - not like some of the other leading Point and Shoots.One other great thing about this camera is it sort of lets you choose your exposure in Auto Mode if you trick it. I've tried this with some other P & S's and it doesn't work well, but this camera will lock exposure when you hold down the shutter button half-way....SO if you want to over exposure your scene a little (to compensate for backlighting for example), you just aim the camera down (or to a darker area) to open up the f-stop and lock the exposure and then boom press the shutter the other halfway down and you've got a little extra light. At first this was a little weird, but after doing it a couple days, it became second nature. The camera does have manual shutter and aperture controls (Again awesome feature you don't find on many other P & S's) but this little trick is actually faster once you get the hang of it. Also - other great feature - Flash will never go off in Auto mode unless you click the button to raise it up. I especially don't like flash unless for a little fill or something so - for me this was a great little extra bonus. We got some amazing shots just using the exposure-lock trick in Auto mode with this camera. I'll try to upload some pics soon.So ANYWAY, everyone that went with me on the trip and the people I've showed our pics to are all raving about this camera now too. I don't rave about too many products, but this is a great one.Oh one other cool feature that seems kind of gimmicky but I ended up using it all the time was the high contrast black and white filter. I wanted to upload our pics during the trip and I love B&W photography for architecture - and the B&W pre-set on the camera creates really unique looking images, so anyway - not great if you're going to post-process, but if you want instant B&W's it's a much better filter than most other Point and Shoots I've used and really fun.

Well, I'm a beginner digital camera user and this camera is a nice size and takes great pictures. Nice and sharp. Pretty easy to grab and go take pictures. However, sometimes I get lost in the menus and have to look up stuff in the manual. If I haven't used it in a while, I forget stuff. I have learned not to share this with my significant other, as it is not easy to figure out how to put the settings back. All in all, a great camera. I just have to get more used to it. The LCD screen is nice and big. Good for my old eyes. And the zoom is easy to work and makes taking pictures from far away easy as pie. I think Nikon lenses give you the sharpest picture but I am no expert. It has video but I don't use it - it takes up too much battery. Recommend you buy a second battery if you are going on a cruise or longer vacation. I lost some good pictures when my battery died unexpectedly. Doesn't give you much warning. However, I would buy this camera again. No camera is perfect especially for a beginner.

I purchased this camera for situations where my bigger Nikon DSLR is too cumbersome or not allowed. I'm extremely impressed with all the features this little camera packs in for such an amazing price. I was able to get a couple of photos of hummingbirds that were actually better than my SLR because the lens in the P300 is so fast. In this case I found shooting via "live view" in the monitor actually made it easier to get the shot than shooting thru my SLRs view finder because my eye wasn't stuck up against the camera and I could see the birds coming in for a landing and actually get the lens on them [if you've ever shot hummingbirds you know how frustrating it is to get the focus right on them because they move so fast]. The menus are intuitive and extremely easy to navigate, and second nature to any Nikon user. I had the menus mostly mastered in the first shooting without reading the manual. The controls are easy for quickly changing shutter speed and aperture while shooting, and getting at the ISO is just another click. The picture quality is what you'd expect from a Nikon.There are some things that aren't perfect for my taste, but I'm willing to put up with them in a compact camera.I find that it over exposes in manual. I've read complaints about this in other Nikon DSLRs, although I don't find it to be true in mine, but in any event, I compensated by under exposing a bit and I'll set an exposure compensation for it. This is easy enough to tweak when shooting in shade or inside, but when shooting with the full sun at your back forget about shooting in manual because you can't see the monitor to adjust settings because of glare. You can't see the exposure indicator at all even though +/- exposure is highlighted in yellow. Not having shot with live view before, given that my DSLR settings are well-lit in the view finder no matter what the shooting environment, I found this inability to set shooting parameters in the sun a huge fail, but I imagine this is a problem in any camera that has manual settings and requires shooting from live view. I guess I'll have to shoot in a landscape or other scene setting when shooting outside in the sun but I'm not especially happy about that.The video is awesome, both visual and sound quality, but shooting in 3D 1080p creates a file that's not going to play smoothly on most computers because of their limitations in video card acceleration and monitor resolution. I have a fast NVIDIA video card designed for gaming and, along with my maximum computer monitor resolution of 1280 x 800, it can't handle that video playback without significant stuttering. I'm going to try to play it on my HD television and see how that does. It also created a 4 min video that came in at 650MB [!!], which is almost the size of an entire movie file. This is just a case of an improvement in one technology [the P300] creating incompatibilities with existing technology. Given there are six video shooting speeds, this is not actually a problem at all, just giving readers the heads up on challenges to playing the full 3D 1080p vid on other devices besides the camera itself.The one thing that does bug me about the video is that it saves the files in .MOV format, the one format that many video editing and compression programs don't handle. So, for example, to compress the video I describe above so that it can play on a typical computer and be small enough to upload to Vimeo or Flickr or Facebook, I'd use Virtual Dub....doesn't work with .mov. So now I have to find something to convert the .mov to something I can work with. Pain in the neck. Maybe I can reset the camera to shoot in a more common video format. I'll actually have to read the manual to find this one out.That Nikon did not include an external charger for this camera is kind of lame, but maybe at this price point doing so was not feasible. Spend the extra 25 bucks and get an external charger so that you can charge an extra battery or charge the one with the camera much more quickly than charging it in the camera. The built in charger takes much longer and comes with a large cord, which takes up valuable space if you're packing this kit for travel. I purchased an extra battery and the external charger. I've gotten great battery performance with shooting multiple 1080 movies and a couple of hundred photos at highest quality. It appears as though I still have a full battery, but I know that sometimes the battery indicators drop all of a sudden; ergo, extra battery.

I thought this was the best of both worlds in terms of a F1.8 lens in a compact camera. It does have the ability to shoot in low light without a flash, but I recently realized that all motion shots I take are blurred. I realize I am not using the camera to its fullest, but it doesn't perform well unless you have a still subject in low light or an action shot outdoors. The video is great and works well. Where we have used the camera repeatedly, at weddings, it really falls short. Pictures up close in low light without too much movement are better than most others, but anyone say walking down an aisle looks like my iPhone took the picture. I am going back to a hybrid camera, a DSLR is too much work with all the lenses for me.