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• The Good: Many features, easy to hold and use, serviceable software, high-quality Nikon engineering and lens.
• The Bad: Pricey.
• The Verdict: A great all-purpose camera for beginners and savvy amateurs.

REVIEW:One of digital photography's major hurdles is the temptation manufacturers feel to make their cameras look like point-and-shoot products. As camera makers manage to find new ways of stuffing technology into small boxes, their products end up being far better than they look, but with a high price tag.

The Nikon Coolpix 5400 is a case in point. It looks like a camera designed for foolproof use, but it contains some superior hardware and software, and is priced at about $1,060 (Cdn. list). It wasn't so long ago that a little more than $1,000 would get you some very sophisticated film-based equipment.

So with digital cameras in that price range, the question of purchasing one becomes a matter of how effectively the digital camera competes with its film counterpart — in short, whether your money gets you as much digital camera as it does with film.

On balance, the Nikon Coolpix 5400 can do that — with a few limitations. Designed to satisfy beginners, it's still flexible enough to suit advanced users, and even challenge knowledgeable users with some of its features.

A 5.1-megapixel camera, the images are detailed enough to be enlarged to 16 by 20 inches (2,592 by 1,944 pixels), more than most people want for home photography. And with Nikon's superior Nikkor lens design, the pictures are quite sharp, with little fall-off near the edges. The lens, in fact, runs from 28 mm to 116 mm (in film-camera terms); for the equivalent in film cameras, a zoom factor like that would require a separate lens and put the price of both camera and lens near $1,000, so with the Coolpix 5400 is already in the right league.

The camera has a short shutter lag — meaning the time between when you press the shutter release and when it finally takes the picture, a process involving autofocus and autoexposure adjustments. It's a problem with many early digital cameras — but on this one, the delay is so short that it's almost irrelevant for home photography.

In enhanced shooting mode, as many as seven full-sized images can be shot at three frames per second. A 64-megabyte buffer allows the photographer to capture five images in an action sequence, and up to 70 seconds of 640-by-480-pixel VGA motion video and audio.

The camera can run in automatic mode right out of the box, but various features can still be tweaked. It can be set for shutter or aperture priority, meaning a savvy photographer can dictate either the speed or the aperture and let the camera figure out the rest, or it can go into totally manual mode for hands-on control.

There are 15 pre-programmed scene modes — settings like you used to get as instructions with film, for bright sunlight, shade — and a light metre that can be selected to expose for the centre of the picture, a specific spot, and automatic or manually set focus points.

It also has a dramatic macro mode, which allows photographs of objects as close as a centimetre from the lens, so even beginners can take some dramatic close-up pictures without too much effort.

Early digital cameras stressed the number of pixels as the primary benchmark for quality, but downplayed the camera's sensitivity to light, usually measured on the ISO scale. Older cameras were abysmally slow, along the lines of ISO 40, meaning they required long exposures and an extra-steady hand to reduce motion blur, even outdoors on a cloudy day.

The CP5400 allows users to select the sensitivity from ISO 50 to 400, which is good enough for outdoor scenes at the low end and most action at the high end during daylight, and just about anything indoors with a flash. To put it into perspective for people with film cameras, few home photographers buy film outside the ISO 50-to-400 range.

The LCD screen monitor at the back of the Nikon is excellent (it swings out and swivels, too). It's optimized for viewing in bright sunlight, though an optional sunlight shade hood can help.

The viewfinder — this is not a through-the-lens camera — is only nominally useful, however; with such a range of zoom and macro options it will give the photographer only an approximation of what will end up in the frame. It has a built-in compensation for telephoto shots, so in "normal" lens mode (equivalent to 55 mm in film cameras) the viewfinder shows less image than the camera will really shoot.

One way digital camera makers like to make customers feel they are getting their money's worth is by loading up the package with a lot of software, and the CP5400 is no exception. It comes with NikonView 6 (which includes one-touch red-eye fixing), Adobe's Photoshop Elements (a superb photo-editing package), VideoImpression (basic video editing in QuickTime format), and PanoramaMaker (an increasingly popular way of stitching photos of one scene into panoramic shots).

PhotoBase, a program that displays photos or slide shows on a personal digital assistant, is also included.

Aside from that software package, the camera comes with a shoulder strap (oddly, the strap-loops on the camera don't swivel, which may tangle the strap), a USB cable for downloading, a video cable for showing pictures or video on a TV, and a 16-megabyte Compact Flash memory card. The card will hold only a handful of pictures in high-quality mode; the buyer should not leave the store without buying a compact flash card with a much higher capacity.

It also includes a Lithium-ion rechargeable battery; you slide the battery into the charger and plug it into the wall outlet. It will recharge in a matter of a few hours.

The drawbacks? There are a few.

The camera is ideal for point-and-shoot photographers, who can also boast that they have Nikon's deservedly famous lenses.

But advanced amateurs may get frustrated with the "film" speed, the highest of which is ISO 400. It would have been nice to see ISO 800, especially for action photography like sports. Changing sensitivity in film cameras is simply a matter of buying a certain grade; in digital cameras it's built in, and you're stuck with what the manufacturer made.

Although the shutter speed has an impressive range of eight seconds to 1/4000 of a second, I really wonder how bright the scene must be to take advantage of such a fast shutter speed — shutter speeds that high are further cramped by the respectable (but not great) apertures (f-2.8 at wide-angle mode, f-4.1 at full telephoto mode).

Also, those who use the continuous-shooting or video modes will have to wait a long time for the images to be written to memory. With the 64-MB buffer full, time to store images in the Compact Flash card can run more than three minutes in fine mode to more than seven minutes in basic mode.

The colour balance of the CP 5400 tends toward cooler shades; though this is easily fixed in the editing process, the white-balance system in the camera can be a tough one for even advanced amateurs to master. There are no fewer than eight different modes in which to set the correct shade of white, including daylight, incandescent, three different levels of fluorescent, cloudy, flash and daylight shade. This might be more adjustment than an amateur needs, though it can be set at automatic and promptly forgotten without too much adjustment required later.

Finally, any photographer who feels constrained by the limitations of the zoom lens can buy wide-angle or telephoto adapters, but each costs about $260, and the benefits are only marginal. The wide-angle lens, for instance, reduces the focal length (effective 35-mm film camera equivalent) from 28 mm to only 22.4 mm; the telephoto increases it from 116 mm to 174 mm. A fisheye lens (183 degrees coverage) costs $440.

In sum, the Nikon Coolpix 5400 will be an excellent choice for beginners and savvy amateurs. But not if the savvy amateurs think they might want more camera than that in the near future.