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Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Digital cameras
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today's bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the holiday season. A new digital camera is a solid go-to gadget present for almost anyone on your list, since everyone loves taking and sharing photos. But pairing the right camera to the right person at the right price can be challenging -- with thousands of camera choices spanning every shape, size, and price tag, picking the right camera can be overwhelming. You're in luck, though -- we've looked through all of 2010's holiday camera offerings and narrowed things down for you. Read on!
Nikon Coolpix S8100 gets 1080p video, S80 sprouts an OLED touchscreen
In addition to the intriguing new Coolpix P7000, Nikon also announced the Coolpix S8100 (pictured above) and S80 tonight -- sure, they're not the dramatic new models, but they're certainly respectable updates to the S8000 and S70. The S8100 actually learned one trick from the P7000: it's dropped the megapixel count to 12.1 from the S8000's 14.2 in order to improve light sensitivity -- it can now hit ISO 3200 natively, which isn't bad for a tiny cam with a 10x zoom. It's also got a new 1080p movie mode and a faster 10fps burst mode -- although we're told it can only burst five frames at a time, so that's not nearly as interesting. It'll hit later this month in a few colors for $299. The S80 goes the other way, boosting the megapixel count to 14.1 from the S70's 12.1, and upping the 3.5-inch touchscreen to OLED. The touchscreen enables all the same snazzy tricks as on the new S1100pj, including the ability to draw right on your pictures, and and the 720p movie mode and 5x optical zoom are unchanged. It'll hit this fall in all sorts of colors for $329. Honestly, we're still not entirely sold on touchscreen controls for cameras to begin with, and on top of that we're definitely concerned that OLED will make a touchscreen camera virtually useless in daylight, but we'll wait to see this thing in person before we rain too hard on this parade. Check a pic of the S80 along with both press releases after the break.
