Is the Nikon Coolpix 950 Becoming"A Legend In Its Own Mind" ?

Is this the most sought after digicam to date?  I've seen lots of digicams come and go in the last couple of years and not one of them has received as much pre-shipment hype as the Nikon 950. My message board and the Usenet newsgroup rec.photo.digital are simply filled to the brim with user messages about the new Coolpix 950.

The messages started as soon as the press release went out about Nikon's new 2 megapixel digicam. People began speculating about what it would look like and how good the image quality would be and so on.

Next came the flood of messages about people who were pre-ordering their cameras so as not to miss the first shipment. I don't believe there has ever been as many cameras pre-sold as the now infamous Nikon 950, dealers are reporting thousands as being already spoken for. One thing to consider however is that many buyers have placed orders with numerous dealers just to be sure to get a camera as soon as possible. This means a lot of cancelled pre-orders down the road.

The Coolpix 950 ships and the anxious buyers finally get their hands on it and actually begin using it. Now the message board is littered with messages posted on the first day of shooting and most read like, "great image quality," "it's smaller than I imagined," "is this camera only supposed to get six or seven pictures per set of alkalines?"   The euphoria wears off and the users begin to discover the imperfections and now this is the main topic of discussion.

The bottom line is that no camera is perfect -- not even the Nikon 950 -- hey, did Steve say that?   Yes he did!

Nikon repeated the same stupid mistake as on the Coolpix 900/900s cameras and put the macro and self timer functions on the same button. What were those engineers smoking when they came up with this idiotic idea?  They must have been smoking the same stuff when they designed the tripod socket, CF card eject mechanism and plastic flip-away door on the bottom of the camera.

I have large fingers and end up using a pair of needlenose pliars to grab the CF card after pushing the eject lever. Next time just make the darn thing pop out a little farther huh?   And that flimsy plastic door covering the CF slot is completely out of class with the rest of the new magnesium alloy body construction.

Despite its imperfections I still predict that the Coolpix 950 will break all existing sales records. No matter how long people have to wait to get one they will still be happy once they finally do get it. It takes excellent pictures ... not perfect pictures, just excellent ones. It gives the advanced user a lot of manual options to improve the picture taking experience and even novices can get great pictures using the automatic mode.

PC Watch Posts Nikon 950 vs Olympus C-2000Z Page

PC Watch has just posted a Nikon 950 vs Olympus C-2000Z page with pictures of the various parts of the cameras and sample pictures from the cameras. According to the Imaging-Resource who did a partial translation -- "Once we have some free time, we'll translate it all for you, but to summarise, PC Watch felt the C-2000ZOOM the easier camera to use, but the Coolpix950 to yield better final results."