Nikon CoolPix 995Nikon updates the hugely successful Coolpix 990, adding a pop-up flash and Type II CF support!<<Reference: Datasheet :(Previous) | (Next): Print-Friendly Review Version>> CoolPix 995 Sample ImagesReview First Posted: 4/25/2001 |
| We've begun including links in our reviews to a Thumber-generated index page for our test shots. The Thumber data includes a host of information on the images, including shutter speed, ISO setting, compression setting, etc. Rather than clutter the page below with *all* that detail, we're posting the Thumber index so only those interested in the information need wade through it! ;) |
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Outdoor portrait: (987 k) The extreme tonal range of this image makes it a tough shot for many digicams, which is precisely why we set it up this way. The object is to hold highlight and shadow detail without producing a "flat" picture with muddy colors, and the Nikon Coolpix 995 does a pretty good job. We shot samples of this image with the automatic (1035 k), daylight (981 k), and manual (965 k) white balance settings, choosing the manual setting for our main series. The automatic and daylight settings both produced very cool images, with automatic resulting in a bluish cast and daylight in a stronger magenta cast. Though the manual setting is a touch warm, we felt the overall color balance looked the best. Skin tones look pretty good, though slightly orange. The blue flowers and the model's pants went rather purplish, a problem we've frequently seen with these colors. (These blues are hard for many digicams to reproduce correctly.) The bright, red flowers have small halos around their outside edges, but detail still looks good, while the boundary between the yellow and blue flowers shows some pixelation. Overall resolution looks very nice, with a lot of fine detail visible throughout the image. Details are very crisp as well, particularly in the flower bouquet, which appears to "pop" out from the image, but the model's hair looks a little flat. (The 995's sharpening algorithm seems to particularly emphasize high-contrast details, and to ignore low-contrast ones.) The shadow areas show reasonably good detail, with moderate noise. Traces of noise are also visible in the sunny portions of the house siding. Our main image was taken with a +0.3 EV exposure adjustment to get the best exposure in the shadow areas without overexposing the bright highlight areas. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Closer portrait: (awaiting production model) When we first shot this test subject, we were shocked by the results: The image had a "milky" look to it, particularly in the shadow areas. Some further experimentation revealed that our eval unit had fairly severe lens flare. When we reported this to Nikon, it developed that this was a known issue with the prototype units. (Any number of things could cause this, ranging from uncoated optical elements to internal light baffles or anti-reflection coatings that have yet to be added.) Given that this was a known and acknowledged issue, and that the images we obtained wouldn't really have been representative of final production, we decided not to post them here: Keep checking our news and new on the site pages, and we'll let everyone know as soon as we get our hands on a production model. |
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Indoor Portrait, Flash: (1011 k) The Coolpix 995's built-in flash does a great job of illuminating the subject, producing a very nicely-exposed shot. The strong household incandescent lighting in this scene produced a magenta color cast in the background, but color on the model is pretty good. The blue flowers of the bouquet have a purplish tint, but the other tones look pretty good. The model's face has some strong magenta tints, and the shadow areas of the white shirt reflect some magenta as well. The 995 has a variable-power option for the flash in its settings menu, but that apparently wasn't activate yet in our eval sample. Since we were testing a prototype model of the camera and only had it for a short time, we also were unable to test it with an external flash. Nikon's speedlights are well-known for their flexibility though: Hopefully, we'll get to test one with the 995 when we get our full-production model. |
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Indoor portrait, no flash: (1215 k) This shot is always a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability, given the strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs used for the lighting, and the Coolpix 995 handles the challenge very well in its manual white balance mode. We tried shots of this subject with both automatic and incandescent white balance settings, but neither came out at all well. - We chalked this up to prototype issues, and will retest with the production model when we receive it. The manual setting produced a very nice image though, with no strong color casts. Overall color looks surprisingly accurate, though the skin tones are a bit too orangish. The blue flowers appear violet in places, and the red flowers are a bit oversaturated. All in all though, a very nice performance on this very difficult subject. Details are again nice and sharp, with a very slight increase in contrast to help define the edges. Overall resolution looks very good, with a lot of fine detail visible throughout. We chose an exposure adjustment of +0.7 EV for our main image, as anything above that began to overexpose the highlight areas and create very splotchy, bright white places on the model's shirt. We also shot with the 100 (1098 k), 200 (1239 k), 400 (1250 k), and 800 (1287 k) ISO settings, noticing a warm shift in color balance at the 400 and 800 ISO settings. Noise is pretty low at the 100 ISO setting, but increases to a very high level at the 800 ISO setting (steadily increasing in visibility with each higher ISO setting). This is typical in digicams: You always get more noise as you increase the ISO setting, but the noise here at the ISO 800 setting is quite prominent. (Perhaps why the camera turns the ISO numbers red on the LCD when the 800 setting is selected: Not really recommended, but there if you need it.) The table below shows a range of exposures from zero to +1.7 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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House shot: (1062k) We shot this image with the automatic white balance setting, which produced fairly accurate results, though with a hint of a warm cast. Overall color looks pretty good throughout the image, with vibrant greens and slightly orange reds. Resolution also looks good, with a lot of fine detail visible in the bricks and shrubbery, and in the tree limbs above the roof. Details are very sharp, and we again noticed that the 995 seems to be altering the contrast to enhance sharpness. In-camera sharpening shows up as about two or three pixels of a halo around the light and dark edges of the white trim along the roof line. The roof shingles and shadows show a reasonably low noise level. Sharpness Series We also shot with the camera's adjustable sharpness settings, which did a noticeable job of increasing or decreasing sharpness. The Off setting produced a very soft image, with no sharp edges at all. The High, Normal, and Low sharpness settings incrementally decreased sharpness, while altering contrast just slightly. Finally, the Auto setting produced very similar results as the Normal setting.
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Far-Field Test (1078 k) This image is shot at infinity to test far-field lens performance. NOTE that this image cannot be directly compared to the other "house" shot, which is a poster, shot in the studio. The rendering of detail in the poster will be very different than in this shot, and color values (and even the presence or absence of leaves on the trees!) will vary in this subject as the seasons progress. In general though, you can evaluate detail in the bricks, shingles and window detail, and in the tree branches against the sky. Compression artifacts are most likely to show in the trim along the edge of the roof, in the bricks, or in the relatively "flat" areas in the windows. We shot this image with the automatic white balance setting, which produced a slightly cool cast throughout the image, especially noticeable in the white highlights of the house trim. This shot is a strong test of detail, given the practically infinite range of fine detail in a natural scene like this, viewed from a distance. Resolution looks great, especially in the tree branches above the house, as well as in the bricks and house front details. The stronger details in the sunny areas of the wooden fence behind the house (visible on the driveway side) and the wood pile are also clear. Overall sharpness looks good as well, with reasonably crisp details throughout the image. We also judge a camera's dynamic range in this shot, comparing how well the camera holds detail in both the shadow and highlight areas. The Coolpix 995 handles the bright, white paint of the bay window well, capturing a fair amount of the stronger details, as well as some of the fainter ones. The shadow area under the porch also fares well, as the brick pattern and porch light details are completely visible. In adjusting its exposure to preserve the highlight detail though, the 995 made the overall image rather dark, a tendency we observed on several other shots with strong highlights. We shot with the 100 (1066 k), 200 (1071 k), 400 (1165 k), and 800 (1151 k) ISO settings, noticing that the exposure dimmed slightly with the 200 and 400 settings. To get an accurate exposure at ISO 800, we had to switch to shutter-priority mode, to get a high enough shutter speed (program and aperture-priority mode shutter speeds top out at 1/500). Noise level increased from moderately low at the 100 ISO setting to moderately high at the 800 ISO setting, though it still wasn't too bad overall. We also snapped a sample image with the 995's black and white (428 k) mode, which resulted in a medium contrast monotone image, with about the same dynamic range. The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series.
Sharpness Series We again shot with the Coolpix 995's adjustable sharpness setting, which produced a nice range of results. Brightness and contrast are only slightly affected at each setting. We noticed that the Auto setting closely resembled the results of the Normal setting.
Saturation Series We also shot with the Coolpix 995's adjustable saturation setting, which produced very good results. Many digicam saturation adjustments produce overly large changes in the images, and so aren't terribly useful for normal shooting conditions. The 995's though offer a very useful range of adjustment, and furthermore seem to leave the other exposure characteristics pretty well alone. A very nice option!
Image Adjustment Series The Coolpix 995 also offers an extensive Image Adjustment menu, offering a wide range of image tweaks. The Auto and Normal settings produced fairly similar results, much the same as the main shot above. The two contrast adjustments make significant changes to the overall image contrast, but also affect saturation and brightness as well. However, the Light and Dark settings do exactly what they say, without affecting saturation or contrast. All of these adjustments are more sophisticated than simple exposure changes: The lighten/darken adjustment in particular works by changing the "gamma" of the image data, affecting the midtones without disturbing the shadows or highlights. This is much more what you'd want in many cases, as opposed to boosting or cutting the overall exposure. The Light/Dark adjustment worked quite well, as did the High Contrast setting - the Low Contrast option darkened the whole image dramatically. (Seems like the Low Contrast option needs some more tweaking by Nikon's engineers.)
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Lens Zoom Range We've received a number of requests from readers to take shots showing the lens focal length range of those cameras with zoom lenses. Thus, we're happy to present you here with the following series of shots, showing the field of view with the lens at full wide angle, the lens at full 4x telephoto, and the lens at full telephoto with 2x and 4x digital telephoto enabled. The Coolpix 995's wide angle setting captures a very wide field of view, with significant space on either side of the house in the frame. (This seemed wider than we'd expected, since the official spec on the lens is that it's the equivalent of a 38mm lens on a 35mm camera.) A hint of barrel distortion is visible along the curb of the street, but the overall image looks good. (But then, this shot isn't terribly sensitive to barrel distortion.) Detail and resolution increase with the 4x telephoto lens setting, as you might expect, with increased image sharpness as well. The overall exposure darkens slightly, and takes on a slight bluish cast. (as the camera reacts to the bright white paint taking up more of the image area.) At the telephoto setting, nearly all the details of the bright white bay window become visible. The 2x digital telephoto setting does a nice job of holding onto detail and resolution, though details become slightly soft. At the 4x digital telephoto setting, resolution is decreased, with much softer details. (Note that all these shots were taken at the1280 x 960 image size, so the amount of softening from the digital zoom isn't as great as it would be with full-resolution images.)
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Musicians Poster (1062 k) For this test, we shot with the automatic (707 k), daylight (706 k), and manual (702 k) white balance settings, this time choosing the daylight setting as the most accurate. The large amount of blue in the image often tricks digicams into overcompensating, but the 995's results looked pretty good. The automatic and daylight settings produced very similar results, but we felt that the skin tones and overall color balance looked more natural with the daylight setting. The blue of the Oriental model's robe is slightly greenish, but still looks pretty good (this is a difficult blue for digicams to reproduce, so the 995 did fairly well). Resolution looks very high, with nearly all of the fine detail in the bird wings and silver threads of the model's robe visible. Even the more subtle details of the smaller bird's wings are distinguishable. The violin strings are nice and sharp, with only a hint of a moire pattern. Likewise, the beaded necklaces and flower garland show very clear, distinct details. Noise is pretty low and mostly visible in the blue background (some "noise" is actually the film grain pattern from the poster itself). |
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Macro Shot (1035 k) Like the 950 and 990 before it, the Coolpix 995 performs exceptionally well (!) in the macro category, capturing a very tiny minimum area of just 0.46 x 0.61 inches (11.64 x 15.32 millimeters). This is probably one of the tightest macro options we've seen on a camera, producing literally microscopic detail. Detail and resolution both look great, with very sharp details throughout the image. The tiny fibers of the dollar bill are completely distinguishable and very sharp. Color balance appears a bit warm, but is still pretty good. The 995's built-in flash (928 k) has a lot of trouble throttling down for this very tiny macro area, barely illuminating it at all. (The flash is blocked by the lens.) Despite the flash, we're very pleased with the 995's macro performance. |
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"Davebox" Test Target (951 k) We shot samples of this target using the automatic (435 k), daylight (434 k), and manual (401 k) white balance settings, choosing the daylight setting as the most accurate. Surprisingly, the manual setting produced a very bluish image. Both daylight and automatic white balance settings produced slightly warm images, though we felt the white of the small resolution target appeared more accurate with the daylight setting. Despite the warm cast, the large color blocks look just about right. (Though the large red block has a bluish/magenta tint to it.) The Coolpix 995 accurately distinguishes the subtle difference between the red and magenta color blocks on the middle, horizontal color chart (a problem area for many digicams), though the black separator line is reddish and both blocks are slightly weak in saturation. Exposure is a little bright, as the subtle tonal variations of the Q60 chart are only visible as far as the "C" range (and even then just barely, this is another common problem area for digicams). The tonal gradations of the smaller, vertical gray scales also look very good, with the two brightest and two darkest blocks blending together only slightly. The shadow area of the charcoal briquettes shows very good detail, with moderately low noise. Likewise, the white gauze area also shows a nice level of detail, though on the verge of being blown out. As we've noticed throughout our testing, resolution is very high, with good detail in the box hinges and silver disk. The black lines of the mini resolution target appear sharp. We also shot with the 995's black and white (357 k) setting, which produced a medium contrast monochrome image, with good tonal handling. Saturation Series We again shot with the 995's saturation adjustments, which did a nice job of incrementally adjusting the overall saturation. The lowest setting wasn't weakened to an extreme, nor was the highest setting overdone. In all, the 995 offers a nice range of saturation levels to play with.
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Low-Light Tests Even though our test unit was a prototype, low light performance was very impressive! Thanks to a "bulb" exposure mode, we got incredibly bright shots all the way down to 1/16 foot-candle (0.67 lux), even at ISO 100. The Coolpix 995's noise reduction function also proved to work very well, removing essentially all the "fixed pattern" noise in the image, due to "stuck" or "leaky" pixels. While the noise increased at the higher ISO settings, the noise reduction algorithms did a very good job of controlling noise all the way out to 8 second exposures at ISO 800. The noise remaining in the image after the noise reduction system does its work looks very much like the grain patterns you'd see on high-speed film emulsions. We'll explore low light performance more once we get our hands on a full-production model, but for now, we have to say that the 995's performance is one of the very best we've seen to date.
To put the 995's low-light performance into perspective, an average city night scene under modern street lighting corresponds to a light level of about one foot-candle, so the camera should easily handle much darker situations. (The 1/16 foot-candle that marks the bottom end of our testing range is quite dark indeed: Dark enough that we have to watch our step, walking around the studio!) The table below shows the ISO series for the 1/16 foot-candle (0.67 lux) light level, with and without Noise Reduction. Images in this table (like all of our sample photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the camera. (And yes, that is a 29.6 second exposure at ISO 100, thanks to the 995's Bulb exposure mode!)
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Flash Range Test In our testing, we found the Coolpix 995's flash brightest at the eight foot distance, at the normal intensity setting. Flash power decreased with each foot of distance, all the way out to 15 feet. At the 15 foot distance, the flash is extremely dim. In this test, we'd rate the flash's performance at about a 9 foot range. Nikon rates the flash at a guide number of 32 at ISO 100, a figure which actually agrees with our own tests, since the lens was zoomed a bit at 8 feet, resulting in an aperture of just about f/4, which would produce an effective range of 32/4 = 8.0 feet. (To get working range, divide the guide number by the lens' f-stop. With a maximum aperture ranging from f/2.6 to f/5.1, the working range of the 995's flash will vary from 12.3 feet at wide angle down to a miserly 6.3 feet at full telephoto.) Below is our flash range series, with distances from eight to 14 feet from the target, with the flash in the normal intensity setting.
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ISO-12233 (WG-18) Resolution Test (1028k) The Coolpix 995 did well in the laboratory resolution test, easily extending to 800-850 lines per picture height in the horizontal direction, and 800 lines vertically. Strong detail is visible to beyond 1000 lines. Overall, a good performance, well in the upper tier of three megapixel cameras we've tested. Resolution Series, Wide Angle
Sharpness Series
Resolution Series, Telephoto
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Viewfinder Accuracy/Flash Uniformity We found the Coolpix 995's optical viewfinder to be rather tight at wide angle (401 k), showing approximately 79.8 percent of the final image, but about 91.4 percent at telephoto (349 k) (at the 2,048 x 1,536 pixel resolution size). However, at the telephoto setting, we couldn't perform an exact measurement, as our standard lines were cut off on both sides. We also noticed that the final image is shifted towards the upper left corner. The LCD monitor fared much better, showing approximately 95.57 percent accuracy at wide angle (399 k), and about 99.54 percent at telephoto (346 k) (also for the 2,048 x 1,536 pixel resolution size). Since we generally like to see LCD monitors as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the 995 does an excellent job. Flash distribution is fairly even at the telephoto setting, though very dim, with a slight reflection present at the center of the target. At the wide angle setting, flash distribution is fairly even and bright, with a little falloff at the corners of the target.
Optical distortion on the 995 is fairly high at the wide angle end, where we measured approximately 0.98 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared slightly better, as we found approximately 0.64 percent pincushion distortion. Chromatic aberration is a bit better than average though, showing only one or two pixels of coloration on either side of the black target lines. (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.) |
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