A New Hobby for Photography: Nikon Coolpix L820.

I was made aware of this camera, by YouTube User Lmull3 / Luke Muller who replaced his Philips CAM110 Pocket Camcorder as a result of a shot battery. And he enjoyed his Nikon L820. And for the price, it's a solid point and shoot camera with only the Focus being the noticeable complaint. It has 30x Optical Zoom which is so much better than all my phones / cameras which all rely on digital zoom for long range shots. It's not the best among the Nikon Coolpix series, but it'll still be a whole lot better than the Galaxy S4 that I use.

Impressions:

Impressions on this camera were promising and for the last 2 months, I've been having a blast with it. Ever since my fellow Music aficionados / Biker Besties from Holy Fam got me into photography as a hobby, rather than a professional, this has been my primary camera.

L820: 30x 16MP Nikkor Lens 16 MP.
Two ways to operate the T/W Zooms: One around the shutter switch for your right hand or the T/W Rocker next to the
Lens for your left hand whichever way you prefer.

It works with both Windows and Macintosh (both of which are easy to grab photoes from). On the windows you can simply go to the DCIM folder and drag the photos out as you normally would from a Thumbdrive. Macintosh would require you to use the iPhoto to get these out but you can choose to import whichever ones you want and you can see the preview of your library of photos at one glance. The importing to Macintosh rather than windows is my preferred one.

It comes with a generous 65 Megs of Memory, which is enough for a dozen 16MP Max Quality Shots, 33 8MP Shots and up to a minute of 720p Video.

The camera does have some heft to it but it's not heavy. Its grip is solidly grippy enough to hold one-handed. Auto-Focus is a bit iffy as said by LMull3, but I normally prefer to switch to a dedicated mode for a much better focus. And the Flash helps that.... A LOT.

Sample Photographs:

Now below are some photos that I did since getting it. And I did want to test how much I can push the camera. Just on Sunday 26th July 2015, one of my uncles came by to do an in-house wedding photoshoot at home. So while Dad was using one of the big boys, the Nikon D7000 DSLR that he has as a primary camera, I was using this. My uncle gladly obliged to do my own set to see how it goes. Now how it stacked up against each other was surprisingly admirably quite close to a DSLR quality camera even for a sub 150 SGD Camera.

The Flickr Album for the Wedding photoshoot:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/48826150@N08/sets/72157654041679363

Now I am not, at any stretch, a professional photographer and you all know me as a musician. So any tips on how to improve my shots are welcomed. That said my uncle was surprised how good even the shots from the L820 turned out.

Meanwhile enjoy some of the photos.

Patio Shot

Shot of the Table which had some of the things the camera was shipped with: The Black Pouch, Proprietary USB Cable,
mini HDMI to Composite, 3100mAH AA Batteries from Xit, (4 in the Camera, 2 in reserve) 

Kitchen Shot

Shot from my Bedroom.

Singapore Esplanade Lighting: Taken during one of my Mahler 8th Rehearsals with the Vocal Associates
And the Orchestra of the Music Makers. That was by far probably my best shot till date.

Panoramic shot from my standing position.

Full Moon shot with the Lens Optically Zoomed in at 30X

Superzoom: Close Up Mode = 30X Optical + 30X Digital is about 60X Zoom.

GTX 950 Releasing on August 17th - Potential Console Killer?

The specs of the GTX 950 whether confirmed or not, is set to battle out with the R7 370 and will replace the 750 / 750 Ti. All these cards within this bracket are perfect as a budget mid-range card and potential HTPC and console killer builds. Only confirmed fact is that rather than basing on the GM107 Core, the GTX 950 will use the same GM206 Core found on the 960. Although nVidia has been successful with the GTX 750 Ti which proved to be enough for budget gaming at 1080p, the 950 is a large update that will replace the 750 and might even beat out the 750 Ti. Now Specs-wise, the leaked specifications are as follows, and here's a quick comparison table between the GM107 based GTX 750, 750 Ti and the upcoming 950.

My guess that the GTX 950 will be around 50% faster than the 750 it will replace and it'll have more power
headroom with an extra 150W from the 8 pin PCI-E.

Now already, the specs shown to be a hot replacement for both GM107 based cards. The GTX 950 will have an 8-pin PCI-E port compared to some having a 6-pin or most of it, none. You have a total of 225 Watts of TDP to play with which is massively overkill but to me, that's no bummer because for 2 reasons. There'd be enough Headroom for overclocking and the other reason is to provide enough juice and power stability when the card is running at full tilt.

Something I'm looking out for whether the card will run SLI. It'll be nice if it can.

It has been reported that nVidia started slashing prices of the GTX 750 Ti / 750 as they'll probably clear out stocks for the 950 release. So those who have been running old 550 Tis, 650, 650 Tis, you have a choice of waiting out for a GTX 950 or go for the cheaper GTX 750 Ti before stocks run dry. Not sure whether a Ti version of the 950 will be released with 3GB of Memory, 896 Cores and hopefully a 192-bit bus. That I doubt nVidia is gonna do that unless pending on reviews.