We all know the saying that the best way of defence is to play offense. Whether it is on the sports field or in the boardroom, sometimes it is best to be aggressive in how you operate. Incremental product updates can be seen as being conservative. Certain companies like Dell and HP release new products which can be seen as a step up from a previous version. It is very similar to an existing model but contains nothing that can create a “WOW” moment.

The one industry that is steadily becoming more under pressure is photography. Olympus has a huge legal issue happening at the moment in Japan over financial irregularities. Kodak has sold their online photography service unit to Shutterfly in an attempt to find funding to ease their credit problems while going into bankruptcy protection.

Add to the mix the higher specification cameras seen in cellphones, such as the iPhone and other smartphones. Then you begin to see that the good old point and shoot digital camera is under threat of becoming a museum piece. For the record this is not a post on the death of digital cameras as high end SLR cameras will almost always be relevant. I cannot picture a professional photographer using a cellphone to take high resolution images for clients. The point I am trying to make is that photography and camera manufacturers are increasingly facing uncertainty over their long term future.

With all the doom and gloom out of the way, I think Nikon has the right idea; to launch feature rich products that users would want to buy.

The Nikon COOLPIX S9300 is a great example of how Nikon is trying to differentiate them from other camera manufacturers. It features a built in GPS function to make geolocation occur while a photograph is taken and not to be added afterwards.

The S9300 also offers a log function that tracks and records movement with acquisition of position information even while the camera is off, and point-of-interest (POI) data (approx. 1,700,000 locations) that can be used to record and display place names. These features offer active users who are often outdoors or travel frequently new forms of enjoyment after shooting as they allow the user to track their route while on vacation, for example, and save that information as a file.

The Nikon COOLPIX S9300 is part of a group of high-powered zoom models equipped with 18x optical zoom NIKKOR lenses. It utilizes thin optics and offers improvements to specifications available in the popular COOLPIX S9100 which was released in 2011.

The Nikon COOLPIX S9300 also joins the ever growing list of cameras that can record video in full HD. A movie function seen in the COOLPIX S9300 is used for recording full-HD movies with stereo sound and superior picture quality, and a new movie function that saves multiple scenes as a single file.

I hope that the Nikon COOLPIX S9300 is a great success as I don’t want the “point and shoot” category to become a relic…