I've tested the
Coolpix
4500 for three weeks, and I were not very impressed by the results of
this camera. There are other
digiscopers
, who are very satisfied with this camera, but the
camera didn't work well with my equipment. Don't ask me why.
The focus often failed, and when the focus did hit, the picture was not as sharp
as my
Coolpix 990
photos.
Laurence Poh
, a great Malaysian digiscoper had the same problems with the
Nikon Coolpix
4500.
I would have expected that there were much more details, cause of the 4MP sensor in
the camera, but I really could not find more details as in my
Coolpix 990
shots. Even
after sharpening and resizing to 2048x xxx pixels (resolution of the
990
) the
990
pictures looked much better as the 4500 pix.
I think the worse picture-quality is caused by the 4x zoom, instead of the 3x zoom of
the
990
.
The colours came out great, sometimes a bit oversaturated. The autocontrast was a bit too hard,
so that I had change the contrast-setting to minimum.
In my eyes all images came out very soft, and were not as crisp as the
990
shots.
The colours of the 4500 are
often a bit oversaturated.
When you set the ISO settings to 200 or higher, the ISO noise of the
Coolpix
4500 is increasing, and shots taken at ISO400 are too noisy to use for prints. There's less noise with 4500 than with the
990
, but in my eyes
there's no progress compared to the
Coolpix 995
.
But there's a little defference between the noise. The ISO noise of the
Nikon Coolpix
4500 seems to be
more in the blue and the
990
and the 955 have more red ISO noise. Maybe it's caused by another kind of
CCD sensor in the camera.
In the photos I took with the 4500 combined to my
Swarovski
Spotting Scope there has often
been some color-fringing or chromatic abberations in bad light situations. But you can
easily remove them with a few clicks in Photoshop.
As you can see, the picture seems
to be a litlle bit soft and
the ISO noise of ISO100 is
clearly visible.
So all in all for me the
Nikon Coolpix
4500 was not good enough. Not much more
details than the
990
or the
995
, most images were a little bit soft and the focus
often failed.
In the field I had so many situations were I thought, that it was the shot of the year, and
at home the pictures were totally unsharp.
And that's another point. The monitor of the 4500 is much too small for judging the pictures in the fields.
All in all the
Nikon Coolpix
4500 was a great disappointment for me in terms of
digiscoping
.
If you want to buy a camera like the
Nikon Coolpix 4500 for only about $60, a scope or just even other things, you can support me keeping this website online when you use
this link to Amazon and then buy your camera or anything else there :
Nikon Coolpix 4500
Thank you for your help :-) !
Article from Somewhere in 2005