If you’ve been holding out on buying a digital camera, waiting for the quality to improve, your wait may be over. Nikon released its latest offering to the digital camera market in June—the Nikon Coolpix 990. The 990 has several improvements over the previous Coolpix 950, including 3.34 megapixels (vs. 2.11 in the 950) and a motion-JPEG mode that allows you to capture short, moving images.

If you’re not familiar with why Nikon’s 3.34 megapixels are a good thing, then imagine the difference between a graphic image that prints out with large dots and little detail versus one that prints out with small dots and lots of detail. The higher the megapixel count, the smaller the dots are on the captured image. With the 3.34 megapixel camera, Nikon has finally made a camera that produces images that approach the quality of a traditional film-based camera.

Since I’ve been an avid camera buff for many years and even have a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism, I have always been convinced that film is the only way to capture a lasting image—until now. I bought the Coolpix 990 (which is a bit pricey at its MSRP of $999.95) because I felt the technology was finally advanced enough to give digital photography a try.

My primary motivation for wanting a digital camera at this stage was to photograph documents at the National Archives in Ireland. The Archives has a policy that won’t allow photocopying of bound documents, but it will allow photography. Last year, I photographed some documents with my film-based camera and natural light (they don’t allow flashes) and was unhappy with the results. This year, I’ll give it a shot with my Coolpix. To test how the camera performs with documents, I shot an original marriage record for one of my ancestors, both with and without flash. Figure 1 is the image with flash; Figure 2 is the image without flash. I like the way the image without flash came out because it doesn’t suffer from the light fallout if the flash isn’t aimed correctly. It’s also just as easy to read as the one with flash, thanks to the digital camera’s ability to read ambient light better than a typical camera.

One of the features I really like about the Nikon is the swiveling lens. You can view an image of the Coolpix 990 to see this. In the image, you can see that the lens is rotated. This allows you to focus on something while still looking through the monitor screen to compose the image. This will prove especially useful when photographing documents because it relieves me from having to stand directly over the document to get a good image of it.

I took the camera on vacation with me last week to give it a try on vacation-type pictures. It worked like a champ, and it was lightweight and convenient to carry. My husband brought along our high-end medium format camera to capture the pictures we may put up on our walls someday, while I was busy taking snapshots. Figure 3 is one of the images I shot on vacation. I plan to submit the images to Kodak’s Web site so I can get print images made to share with family members that vacationed with us. For more information on this service, be sure to read my article “Lasting Images: Protecting Your Photographic Heritage” from the May/June 2000 issue of Ancestry Magazine.

The Coolpix allows you to save your images in four different modes, depending on the quality you want to preserve: TIFF (high resolution); JPEG fine; JPEG normal; and JPEG basic. I shot my images in JPEG normal, and each image file size is about 650 kilobytes. The Coolpix comes with a 16-megabyte Lexar Media CompactFlash for storing the images, but you can purchase CompactFlash cards in sizes up to 96 megabytes (the largest size tested by Nikon, according to the manual). Before our trip, I purchased a 96-megabyte CompactFlash card from an Internet vendor and paid about $230 for it. The card can store about 120 JPEG normal images on it; if you choose other image modes, the card will store more or less accordingly.

Downloading the images is very simple with the accompanying USB connector. Once you’ve attached the cable, you turn on the Coolpix and the computer will automatically recognize the Nikon and open a window to it. The window will display the images you have stored on the CompactFlash card. You can then copy the image and paste them onto your hard drive or removable storage. I copied all the vacation images and pasted them onto a ZIP disk for storage. I’ve included one of the images (Figure 3) from my vacation so you can see the quality of the photo. This was one of the many brightly painted moose we encountered in Toronto.

If you’re looking for a mid-range, high-quality digital camera, you can’t go wrong with the Nikon Coolpix 990. For more information and specifications, visit Nikon’s Web site.

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or at gceditor@ancestry.com.