Unboxing the Nikon CoolPix S9500

Hi Dave Johnson editor of eHow Tech here, and let’s unbox the Coolpix S9500. Now, why are we opening this thing up, because it is a great gift if you’re looking to give something kind of techy to somebody in your family, mother’s day, father’s day, some other holiday. I love cameras in particular because it really encourages someone like my mom to upgrade to a higher quality camera that takes great pictures. Let’s open this up and see what’s inside. Pretty typical for Nikon, we’ve got user guides and that sort of thing up on top, it also comes with some discs, one disc is the reference manual, you might want to keep that around because all you’ve got here is a quick start guide. This thing, View NX2, which is software, every manufacturer does this –they throw in a bunch of software, throw it away don’t even don’t install it on your PC. Windows or Mac has the software that you need to copy your photos over and edit them, that sort of thing so I don’t mess with that stuff. Let’s keep opening this guy up, see what’s in here. This is the USB cable for connecting it to your PC, there’s audio-video cable so that you can show the photos from the camera directly on your PC, camera strap, here is the AC adaptor and we have a USB port here, that’s where we plug the cable into, that goes into the camera, and it’ll charge up the battery which is in the camera. There’s the battery. So we’ve looked at everything except the camera itself. The camera is very small, very compact; let’s start by loading it up with the battery. Now I’ve already cheated, I’ve charged this battery up; it takes about four hours to charge it up from scratch. Notice that if I stick the battery in and it doesn’t stay in there it’s because the battery is in backwards. So we just put it in the other way. And now it clicks. It does not come with a memory card so I have my own SD memory card, stick it in there, locks in place, we turn it on and the lens pops out. I have a 22X zoom so it goes from very wide to very telephoto. It automatically is set to Auto Mode so I can just start taking pictures; it takes good shots, that’s great. But I recommend anyone that gets a camera like this, explore the extra features. That’s why you’re going to spend about $350 on this camera because in addition to just taking full auto shots, it also lets you do a bunch of scene modes and really explore your creativity. For example I set it to scene and now I can press the menu button and cycle through a whole bunch of scenes like portrait landscape modes sports for action photography. In addition I can switch to exposure compensation mode so I can over or underexpose the picture. Those are pretty much all the basics you need to know to take the camera out of the box and start shooting. Except there’s a couple of extra goodies in this camera and that’s why I recommend this one. It has WiFi, you can actually transfer wirelessly photos to another device and GPS. GPS is really cool, so you turn on the GPS feature, when you take a picture it embeds the location information in the metadata of the photo, it means that when I transfer these photos to the PC or I upload them to Flickr it knows where the photo was taken so I can look on a map and see a little trail of where I took all my pictures. So in a nutshell that is the Nikon Coolpix S9500, about $350, a really good gift choice.