Back in the Saddle

Nikon #4 is a Coolpix L16 with more pixels than the law allows. It follows a 3200, an L10 and an L12. As the model number has gone up, the price has gone down. The L16? $99.84.

Now, as an experienced digital camera buyer who has done a great deal of price shopping, I'll let you in on the secret of low prices for digital cameras. W-a-l-m-a-r-t. Nobody else comes even close. Their secret? The newest Coolpix is the L18 with 8.0 megapixels and that's what you buy at the Big Box stores. At Sam Walton's it's the older L16 with 7.2 megapixels. I use about 10% of the pixels, in either case, on Web pages. Indeed, the image above contains only 0.07 megapixels.

The human eye, by contrast, has 120 millions rod "pixels" and 6 or 7 million cone "pixels" which the brain somehow uses to make sense of the image captured by the camera.