I recently posted if all the extras they were trying to tell me I
needed were really true, and thank you for your responses.
I now find myself wondering... What did others buy with their new
cameras? How much difference in the 512 mb and 1 gb, other than
price? How many photos do they each store respectively? DO you
always buy an extra battery?
Compared to an SLR where everything comes "ala carte", cameras like the 8800 come pretty well equipped so even without any add-on's it's a pretty versatile system. Since you like shooting at distances, an add-on tele extender would be one good option. The one's that Nikon sells specifically for the 8800 are excellent but a bit pricey. You can also adapt the camera to other tele converters such as the 5700's TC-E15ED or the Oly B300. These also work very well and can be had for a little less money.
When shooting at these long focal lengths, as much as VR can help, a sturdy tripod can be a very big help. One advantage with this type of camera is that the size and weight is much less than that of an SLR equipped with an equivalent focal length lens so you can use a relatively small tripod which can make travelling and hiking with this kind of system a heck of a lot easier.
The 8mb files are fairly large so you probably don't want to go with anything smaller than a 512mb card. The camera is the first Coolpix to support a 32 bit file system so it will accept cards up to 4GB. It's a personal decision whether or not to go with one very large card or divide your shooting among a few smaller cards. The big card option is obviously convenient, but write performance will begin to slow down somewhat as these cards begin to fill up, especially if you've been deleting selected images along the way. Also (as long as none of them get lost along the way) there's some safety in numbers in that if you're using multiple cards and you fun into any kind of a card failure, you'll be less likely to lose all images.
If you're shooting RAW files, each shot will be 12.6mb so you could fit up to about 40 images on one 512mb card (roughly the capacity of a 36 exp. roll of film. A one Gb card will double that. Extra Fine JPEG's come in up to about 8mb each (actual JPEG sizes will vary depending on the type of images). That would give you roughly 64 shots per 512mb card. Of course you can shoot at higher JPEG compression ratio's and/or lower resolutions when you need to save space, but it's usually a good idea to shoot at the higher quality settings whenever it's feasible in case you end up with something really special and want to have all the detail possible.
Having an extra battery (or more) is important. There's nothing worse than running out of power before you're ready to finish shooting. Adding an extra charger along with the battery can allow you to charge them simultaneously, which can help to minimize any downtime.
There's no reason to run out and grab all of this stuff at once. As you use the camera you'll be better able to gauge what kinds of capacities you require and can add extra cards/batteries as you find you need them.
Have fun!
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Tom Young FCAS member
http://www.pbase.com/tyoung/ 