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Nikon's latest digital camera, the 3.34-megapixel Coolpix 880, offers cool features aplenty, including a useful picture-in-picture mode and 11 new preset modes for capturing beaches, fireworks, and other scenes that often challenge novice photographers. Even better, it incorporates most of the features of the top-of-the-line Coolpix 990 (including the same top resolution) but does so for a couple hundred dollars less.

I looked at a preproduction version of the Coolpix 880, which is set to ship in late September for $799 ($200 less than the Coolpix 990). Aimed at budding photography enthusiasts, the Coolpix 880 arranges shooting modes on the mode dial by level of difficulty, and it lets you set more of them with buttons instead of LCD menus.

Many Helpful Controls

Working with the camera's four well-labeled function buttons, the eight-setting mode dial, and the four-way multiselector, I was able to quickly get the hang of adjusting exposure, aperture, and shutter speed, along with more basic options such as flash and focus, without looking once at a menu. To set aperture, along with other advanced options such as white balance, you turn the dial to A; you turn it to P for programmed automatic. For full manual mode--in which you can set both aperture and shutter speed (from 60 seconds to one thousandth of a second)--you set the dial to M. It would have been nice, however, to have better control over more of the general settings. For example, having a convenient way to set resolution and compression other than ISO (which corresponds to the speed ratings on film) is more important to me.

Those minor complaints aside, the 11-ounce Coolpix 880 does an impressive job of squeezing most of the Coolpix 990's features into a compact, well-designed case. It lacks the Coolpix 990's twisty design, which lets you swivel the flash/lens unit to frame photos in practically any position, including self-portrait. However, the Coolpix 880 has just about everything else: It takes the same add-on lenses and offers the same smorgasbord of capture and playback controls, including a high, 2048-by-1536-pixel maximum resolution and the capability to capture up to 40 seconds of QuickTime video. The camera also lets you choose from five separate areas of focus in the viewfinder and provides smooth, 2.5X optical (4X digital) zoom into captured photos.

Both novices and pros should like the Coolpix 880's Quick button, which generates a thumbnail image of the last photo taken in the LCD's upper-left corner. The inset gives you an on-the-spot reference to your most recent results so that you can assess what you might do differently with the next picture.

If you're not quite ready to trust your own exposure-making skills to photograph an event, the Coolpix 880 has a slew of preset modes that make the necessary adjustments for 11 different picture-taking scenarios. You just dial to Scene, press the Menu button, and choose from Sunset, Beach/Snow, Fireworks, Sparkler, Landscape, and six others.