projectorI am super excited about the creativity in the idea of putting a projector into a camera. What a fantastic and fun way to share images with friends, or even create a brilliant company presentation for prospective clients! What could be more exciting that a pocket size projector, ready to present you wedding photographs at your family dinner, your holiday snaps at your friends party or your children’s school play images when you are visiting granny and grandpa.

The camera is kitted with a remote control that operates both the projector and the normal camera functions. The projected image will be between 13cm (top corner to bottom corner) and one meter (top corner to bottom corner) wide depending on how far away you are setting up the projector. To obtain an image 13cm wide, the projector will be around 30cm from the wall you are projecting onto. For an image 1 meter wide, the projector will be around 2meters from the object you are projecting onto. The better the lighting conditions for the projector (the darker the better) the more clear your images will be when projecting them and Slide Show Effects make projecting effortless and easy.

The two ideas that really stand out for me the COOLPIX S1000pj is that it is a really great quality compact camera and even though it is the first camera ever to come out with an in-camera projector, the price is welcoming, estimated at around R4,000!

Projector aside, the S1000pj has a 2.7 inch wide viewing-angle TFT LCD screen and 12.1 effective megapixels, a good ISO maximum of 6400 and an EXPEED image processor, all lending aid to really great quality images in a little dynamite package.

The Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj has a wide angle 5X zoom Nikkor lens. Scene Auto Mode will ensure that you are always shooting with the correcting lighting and white balance settings for the perfect image. Image blur is virtually written off for the aid of the internal operation of this Nikon. A handy feature called Skin Softening lets you “airbrush” a subjects face and reduce the appearance of skin blemishes and of course the COOLPIX S1000pj has Face Tracking and Smart Portrait.

Without listing absolutely all of the features that make the Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj a really great camera I can tell you that the resulting images are clear and crisp. Camera shake is well controlled and shooting in low lighting conditions is not an issue and the images are clean and smooth.

There are some in-camera editing options, Quick Touch lets you push the saturation and contrast to enhance your images. The COOLPIX S1000pj has four different movie modes, recordable with sound and the 36 MB of internal memory will certainly aid in making sure you have that extra space when your memory card fills up.

The Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj will be coming out in Black and Silver (I hope that once Nikon has gauged the popularity of the camera - they bring it out in some fun and funky colours too!) I think this little camera is going to be a brilliant pocket accessory for 2010! Watch closely as the other brands start to follow suite with in-camera projectors.