The Coolpix meets its match. Our friend Laura, photographed at
different times the same evening using both the Nikon Coolpix 995 and
a friend's borrowed Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel SLR. I take a lot of
indoor photographs of people but dislike flash, so many of the Nikon
pictures end up pretty blurry. The 6-megapixel Canon SLR allows much
shorter exposures and thus sharper pictures, thanks to both its superb
sensitivity, giving lower noise at ISO 800 than the Nikon at ISO 400,
especially after resampling, and the fact that I can use a fast f1.8
lens from my old analog Canon EOS camera with it. The Canon SLR also
has very fast and accurate focus so it's easier to catch fleeting
expressions. But it's also much less handy and more intrusive, being
much bigger and more "camera-like", so I'm not ready to give up the
old Coolpix yet.

Both pictures taken on the evening of December 15th 2003. Each is
color-corrected and cropped to the same fraction of the full frame,
then resampled to the same pixel size.