recommend Nikon P&S

Hi- friend of mine wants a new point and shoot camera that is fairly compact but has a decent optical zoom (7x, 10x). She would like to buy Nikon but frankly I haven't got a clue what might be out there. Can anyone advise?

I bought a Panasonic Lumix bridge camera for my kids when we went to Alaska. The imaging was actually excellent and it took quite a bit of abuse (as expected from teenagers), although it's not as small as some of the P&S cameras. I think the equivalent model is now the FZ47 (they had the older version).

My wife has the Coolpix S9100, Pretty much the top of the line Nikon P&S and I am not very impressed.
It has 12.1 mp, 18x zoom, all the bells and whistles, but the problem is they try to pack too much into a small
pocket camera and the result is, the IQ is not that great. If this is the best Nikon P&S, I would look at other brands.

Hi John,
I just went through an evaluation to find a super-zoom P&S camera. I wanted a good quality for the price, small, but 12x or so zoom, so larger than a fit in your pocket camera. It also had to have raw (which really narrowed the field). I settled on a Fuhji HS20 exr but as I was about to buy the Fuji hs30 exr came out and the hs20 price dropped to $289. Very little difference witht he 30exr, but I bought the 30 anyway as it is part of my Etendue articles. It is about what one would expect from a P&S, but actually I am impressed for the price. It is advertised as a 720 mm equivalent f/5.6 (Ha Ha, you know what I think about crop factor BS). I'm attaching an image of the moon from March 30 done at full zoom. Not bad! Actually the chromatic aberration is quite low. The attached moon image is an out-of-camera jpeg! It lacks the fine detail of a real 700 mm lens due to it's small aperture (126 mm true focal length so 22.5 mm aperture) so fine detail is limited by diffraction. But I am impressed at the detail that is there.

Roger

Thanks to all! I will pass along the comments. It looks like a company other than Nikon will get her business.

There is a really nice new Coolpix from Nikon - the P310. It's got the new Nikon AF system, 16 megapixels, scene modes, and video. The auto face recognition in the AF system is really quite good.

The higher priced option is the V1 or the J1. I have a V1 and it's awesome.

Thanks Eric.