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The figures released with point and shoots usually don’t correlate with DSLR ratings, there is some hype involved. To find out how this Nikon really rates you’d have to compare it side by side with a known lens and see which one gets “closer”.

I have an apples and oranges comparison between my wife's point and shoot Nikon Coolpix camera and my old Canon EOS 20D equiped with a telephoto lens and a two-power teleconverter. Perhpas this will illustrate to some folks what you can to with a DSLR and good lenses.

I think my wife's point and shoot has about an 8mm focal length. It's good for inside flash pictures and outside closeups and landscape shots, but it is not very good for bird photography which is what I like to do.

Here's a picture my wife took with her point and shoot Nikon of a lake near Houston. I guess it is perhaps 40 yards across the lake. I've annotated the photo with arrows pointing out two birds in the tops of trees on the other side of the lake. My wife thought the bird on the right had some red on it and was perhaps a woodpecker. She was right.

In comparison, here are my pictures of the pileated woodpecker on the right and the tricolor heron on the left. These two shots were taken with an 8 megapixel Canon 20D at 1280mm focal length (1.6 from camera times 400mm from lens times 2 from teleconverter). I used a monopod to steady the camera. (The coot pictures I posted above were hand held.)