Nikon Coolpix 4300 By kenthebear on Sep 22, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

One of Nikon's "budget" cameras, so to speak. Although these are an excellent recommendation for a new photographer or someone who wants to take casual shots, it does feel a little cheap. It's rather small, and although it is durable, you feel it's going to fall apart any second. It's a 3 megapixel camera, and the picture quality is excellent for such a cheap and small thing, although it does get a little blurry at times. The menus are based around a dial on the top but they are symbol based and most of the time you'll be diving into the instruction manual, having no idea what a symbol means. This can be a pain at times. It's rather extendable, taking a lot of custom lenses for it, which is a nice bonus. The memory is CompactFlash, which aren't the cheapest cards in the world, and there is no built in memory, which is kind of annoying. The screen is quite small, but large enough to have a decent picture and still fit all the menus/symbols on. However, the bundled software, Nikon View, is horrible, as is the transferring photos to computer method. My advice, switch from USB Mass Storage to USB PTP in the Setup menu.

All in all, for the price, not a bad little thing, but you could probably find better.