Nikon 990 manual

The Coolpix 990 has benefited greatly by what Nikon learned while designing the D1. You may not know what the big deal is about multizone focusing but you will once you use it. It's especially handy when shooting in wideangle as the focus system will actually track an object moving from one zone to another or focus on the closest subject to the camera, whether in the center of the frame or not. As with the D1, the user can also manually control the focus area by using the jog switch and lock it on one area or another when desired. You can easily shoot an off-center subject by selecting the desired focus zone. And the spot metering system can be set to follow the focusing zone.

Great photographs start with great lenses, the Coolpix 990 has a fast f2.5, 9 element, all glass Nikkor 8-24mm (35mm equivalent of a 38-115mm) zoom lens. Behind the lens is a new 7-blade iris diaphragm for true depth of field control. The autofocus system is a contrast-detect TTL type with 4,896 steps for precise focusing from less than one inch to infinity. Autofocus can be continuous when the LCD is on or single autofocus is activated by a half press of the shutter release. Focusing can also be performed manually in which case the distance is indicated on both LCDs and can be visually confirmed on the color LCD with the peaking function.

As with the previous Coolpix 9xx cameras, the 990's lens is threaded and accepts all the Nikkor add-on lenses and filters. Currently available is the WC-E24 wideangle, TC-E2 2x telephoto and the FC-E8 fisheye converter and the Coolpack filter set. Coming soon is a new TC-E3 3x telephoto lens. And there are of course many other third-party 28mm-37mm adapters and stepup rings available too.

Another feature taken from the professional cameras is the Flexible Program mode. The 990 works like the 950 when in its the "P"rogrammed automatic mode, the camera will pick the best combination of shutter speed and aperture automatically. With Flexible Program you now just rotate the command dial to quickly select other combinations of shutter speeds and apertures. Whatever combination you pick, it will be be correctly exposed for the current lighting and ISO sensitivity.

New to any Nikon camera is the QuickTime movie mode. You can capture Quarter-VGA (320 x 240) resolution motion video at 30fps. I'm not a big fan of this mode but it can be used to capture the baby's first steps or your kid smacking a home run out of the ball field. And probably a million other things that I think are more suited to a video camcorder, especially considering that the camera has no microphone so your videos will be silent movies. But it's there if you want it, just put the 990 into movie mode, press the shutter button and record up to 40 seconds of action. It eats up a lot of memory though, a 10-second clip is around 4MB in size.

Much more useful (IMHO) is the Best Shot Selector or BSS mode. This is a very controversial feature that a lot of folks say doesn't really work but it has for me. The camera takes a sequence of four or five shots and then analyzes them using some kind of high-tech "fuzzy logic" and saves the best one. It is handy for slow shutter speed shots in dim lighting or for handheld macro shots that probably should have been taken using a tripod. Another handy feature is auto-bracketing where the 990 will take a series