Nikon Camera’s they are the best!!

I purchased my first Nikon camera in 1982 when I was still in high school. It was a great camera and took fabulous pictures. I did not really know anything about camera’s or how they worked. It was available in all black and black with chrome trim, mine was black with chrome trim. The FE was considered an advanced semi-professional camera and for a high schooler it was intimidating. This camera was an electromechanically controlled, manual focus SLR with manual exposure control or aperture priority auto exposure. Most of the time I mine set in Auto, I was not smart enough to figure out how to use it in the manual mode. There were indicators in the view finder that told me the settings the camera decided to use to take the picture. I did not take that many pictures back then, I was a high school kid so most of my money went to beer and related party favors.

My next camera purchase was right before I went on a South American cruise in 1985, I was in the navy at the time and I had no idea where my FE had landed. The FA was considered an advanced amateur level camera and I picked it up in Virginia where I was stationed. I really liked this camera, maybe because I was beginning to understand how to take pictures, and I got a great number of them in the 6 months it took to get around South America and Africa. Again most of the time this camera stayed in the automatic mode but I began experimenting with the different modes. This one I got in all black, it was a cool looking camera as well. Both these cameras had the lens that came on it and I never purchased any others.

My favorite Nikon, still to this day, was my next one, the F3HP with the MD-4 auto winder and the SB-7E Speedlight flash. Now this was a camera! The automatics were great, the auto winder was smooth and very fast, the batteries in the winder, 8 AA’s also powered the camera. This Nikon incarnation had manual and semi-automatic exposure control whereby the camera would select the correct shutter speed. It was also the first of numerous Nikon F-series cameras to be styled by Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, and to include a red stripe on the handgrip -- a feature that would later become (with variants of stripes and various other shapes) a signature feature of many Nikon cameras. I bought all manner of lens for this camera over the years, everything from the stock lens to a Nikkor 100-300mm f/5.6s MACRO Zoom lens to a 500mm reflex lens along with the fish eye. This camera is GREAT and I love it and still use it with outstanding results.

My latest Nikon purchase is the Coolpix S220 10MegaPixel digital Camera, in plum. This is my 5th digital camera, the first was a Polaroid and I paid a fortune for it, it was before the advent of the USB interface and had an RS232 connection to my computer. I do not think they were rating them by the number of pixels yet and I know this model had way less than a 1 megapixel CCD in it. Anyway this Coolpix was less than 150 bucks and comes with a lithium Ion cell phone style battery, no more burning through AA batteries. An extra battery was about 20 bucks and a 16 gig memory card was less than 50 bucks. It comes with an impressive software package that makes getting pictures from the camera to the computer as easy as mashing the transfer button. Once on the computer they are available for what ever you may need them for.

So this camera has many features and modes, all menu driven so it may not friendly for the menu adverse folks. It has many different scene modes already programmed in, night shots, indoor shots, black and white shots and one feature that takes 16 pictures and makes them a sheet, kind of like the little pictures you got when you school pictures came in. I have not had this camera long and already love it! It is not much bigger than a credit card and about thick as a restaurant steak. The LCD display is 2.5 inches and very bright, they say I can get up to 200 shots on a single battery charge, I bought two just in case. This camera will never replace my F3 with a 500mm reflex lens for taking pictures of the moon but it gets a A+ for ease, toss it my pocket and go. I have shown it to my wife and in very short order she has fallen in love with it so I may have to get another one for me, I liked the plum color too.

I know this may be sounding like a Nikon commercial and maybe it is but I have had VERY good experiences with Nikon and their cameras. I wish I could afford a D300 or even the D90, which are their digital SLR cameras, now those are some cool cameras. I have 2 friends who own the D80 and just recently I found out they make an adaptor that would allow the thousands of dollars of manual focus lens to fit and operate on the autofocus cameras, albeit still in manual mode. They are more like my F3 film camera, more a professional unit but for someone who love to take pictures and still does not understand a lot of the manual features I think I could work wonders with one of those. It has been on my wish list for some time but they seems just an extravagant purchase in these times.

We live in an age that technology never ceases to amaze me, what wonder gadget are you impressed with?