Nikon COOLPIX 100 retro review

Nikon COOLPIX 100 retro review

2nd July 2021

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Back in 1996, Nikon entered the consumer digital photographic camera grocery store with the COOLPIX 100. It cost around $500, had one tierce of a Megapixel and solved the thorny trouble of expensive memory cards or annoying serial cables by building the camera into an industry-standard PCMCIA visiting card, so you could simply expansion slot the camera into a congenial laptop and directly access the images. In the video below I took the COOLPIX 100 out around Brighton to envision how it performed a quarter of a century afterward information technology first came out!

The COOLPIX 100 may own been Nikon's first consumer camera, but it wasn't its start digital photographic camera of any type. Information technology had collaborated with Kodak and even out NASA in the early to mid Nineties to equip various picture show SLRs with digital sensors and warehousing, while in 1995 it joined forces with Fujifilm to evolve the E2 serial of DSLRs. But the COOLPIX 100 was Nikon's first attempt at a consumer integer camera.

Back in 1996, everyone had different ideas about what a digital television camera should look like and Nikon opted for a vertically-oriented device you held a trifle care a Bodoni smartphone. With the optical viewfinder and shutter release in the middle, it was also equipoised. Simply what ready-made it really unique was building the camera into a PCMCIA card. Canon did something similar in the preceding twelvemonth with the CE300, but that model required to stay connected to the laptop for force, control and computer memory whereas the COOLPIX 100 was a standalone camera.

Nikon equipped information technology with a rigid lens like to 52mm with a one third of a Megapixel CCD sensor behind IT, capturing images with 512×480 pixels. With 1MB of built-in memory you could store 21 images with Fine densification Oregon 42 in Median.

Exposure was in full automatic, although you could adjust the tasteless mode and even activate a self-timer although at that place was no tripod thread. The current settings were shown on a small LCD blind on the top, although like most cameras of the day there was no covert on the back to review images.

For power the COOLPIX 100 used four AA batteries which means it's easy to economic consumption nowadays, but information technology may be harder to find a working laptop with a PCMCIA time slot Eastern Samoa these were generally phased out around the early 2000's. Since my PCMCIA USB placard reader didn't want to talk to the COOLPIX 100, I had to visit an old computer amend shop – Laptop Chap in Brighton's Open Market – to ascertain a suitably old mannikin, but one time inserted, it conferred its storage as a 1MB removable drive from which IT was quick and easy to imitate the images out.

Nikon launched the COOLPIX 100 around the same sentence as the COOLPIX 300, another vertically-shaped device just more of a personal organizer with a 2.5in touch screen for taking notes and the power to record sound memos too. Unmatchable year later in 1997 though, Nikon uninhibited this shape for the COOLPIX 900 serial of cameras aimed much much at the desires of photographers.

Nikon COOLPIX 100 sample images

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