Nikon Coolpix 2500 Review
A Photographic Pez Dispenser?
Eric Grevstad
Tue 4/2/02 -- What do you get when you cross Nikon's popular, pivoting-lens Coolpix 995 with a cell phone? The new Coolpix 2500 -- a coat-pocket digital camera whose lens swivels inside the body like a window-shade louver or car-dashboard cooling vent.
It's not a high-end, high-resolution camera to please expert photographers; it's a two-megapixel consumer gadget that combines autofocus simplicity with a few extra controls for users who want to go a step or two beyond point-and-shoot. And at the risk of putting ourselves in the lowbrow latter category, we'll say it's our favorite digital camera to date.
Actually, apart from its TV-remote rectangular instead of stack-of-floppies square shape, the Coolpix 2500 is very like Nikon's Coolpix 775 -- though it costs $20 less, $380 versus $400. Both are compact, 1,600 by 1,200-pixel cameras with 3X optical zoom. Both come with a lithium-ion battery and recharger instead of making you buy out your drugstore's supply of AAs.
Both offer a compromise between their fully automatic modes and higher-end cameras' fully manual control with a variety of "scene modes," prefab combinations of exposure and flash settings for picture-taking situations such as indoor portraits, outdoor landscapes, and backlit subjects. The 2500 has a dozen scene modes to the 775's seven, and comes with a more usable 16MB instead of 8MB CompactFlash card (though Nikon labels even the former a "starter memory card").
While both can capture 15-second, 320 by 240-pixel QuickTime videos -- without sound -- the Coolpix 2500 can't show movies or stills on a TV set, since it lacks the 775's video-out port. And in a bit of a design gamble, the 2500 omits its sibling's and other cameras' traditional optical viewfinder: You frame every shot using the Nikon's LCD monitor, which is what most casual digital camera users do anyway, but can be a washout in outdoor sun (although the 2500's LCD is a bit more glare-resistant than most we've seen, helped by the ability to hold the camera above or below your face while swiveling the lens to stay pointed at your subject).
Though a bit bulky for a shirt pocket, at 4.5 by 2.3 by 1.2 inches and 7.5 ounces with battery and CompactFlash card installed, the Nikon is easy to carry in a jacket pocket, and its swivel-shut design means you don't have to fiddle with a lens cap. Turn the camera on with the lens shut, and an animation on the LCD reminds you to flip it open; you can shoot with the lens aimed normally (at right angles to the camera body) or up to 40 degrees above or below horizontal when pointed forward, or up to 40 degrees above horizontal pointed backward for self-portraits.
The camera is fairly easy to use one-handed (right-handed), with your index finger on the shutter button and thumb to press the wide-angle and telephoto zoom buttons. A sliding switch on top, beside the shutter on a fingerprint-smudgy chrome strip, switches between shooting, playback, and power-off modes.
A latched door on the left side opens to reveal the battery and CompactFlash Type I (IBM's Microdrive won't fit) slots; a rubber flap that feels likely to break off covers the connector for the supplied USB cable. Windows XP, 2000, and Me automatically recognize the Coolpix as a plug-in storage device, so you can drag images from the camera to your PC in Windows Explorer, but the bundled Nikon View 5 image-transfer and -browsing software performs more elegant feats such as transferring images with the push of a button on the camera's back or uploading them to the free NikonNet service.
The 2500 uses a flat lithium-ion battery (part number EN-EL2, smaller than the EN-EL1 of the Coolpix 775 and 5000) that recharges in two to three hours. We averaged a reasonable 90 minutes' shooting, reviewing, and uploading per charge (with, remember, the LCD monitor always on). A battery icon appears in the monitor when you're down to your last 10 or 15 minutes.
