Chances are, your friends have seen a digital camera by now; they'll no longer grin or exclaim, "Look at that!" if you show off the LCD screen on the back to view a just-taken photo or plug a camera into a TV set for a slide show. But you can still start a conversation by carrying the Nikon Coolpix 775 -- or at least hear your friends cry, "It's so cute!"

Indeed, the silvery 775 is adorable, mainly because it's so tiny -- just 3.4 by 2.6 by 1.7 inches, about two-thirds the size of your computer mouse, and 8 ounces with its battery and CompactFlash memory card installed. It even makes cute, rapid clicking or chipmunk noises when switched on and moved about, as its auto-focus locks onto various possible subjects.

But the 2-megapixel Coolpix 775 is at least as convenient as it is cute. It won't weigh you down (actually, you can conceal it in your palm), or make you fuss with a lens cap (its 3X optical zoom lens has a built-in, retractable cover). It won't confuse casual users with complex manual options, but it's not a one-setting-fits-all snapshot camera -- in addition to the usual automatic mode, a clever mode dial on the top lets you instantly pick scene or lighting conditions before you point and shoot.

And unlike most mass-market digital cameras, it comes with a lithium-ion battery and recharger in the box instead of guzzling AA batteries. That made it a fair deal when it debuted at $450 a few weeks ago, and now that Nikon has cut its price to $400 (with lots of Web vendors offering it for under $340), it's one of the best values in the 2-megapixel class.

Petite But Proficient

The Coolpix 775 has a 2.14-megapixel (2.0-megapixel effective) CCD that captures 1,600 by 1,200-pixel images, as well as 1,024 by 768- or 640 by 480-resolution shots. Three JPEG compression settings -- Fine (4:1), Normal (8:1), and Basic (16:1) -- give a total of nine size/quality combinations. There is no uncompressed or TIFF image mode, but you can capture silent QuickTime video clips (up to 15 seconds) at 320 by 240 resolution.

As is true of virtually every digital camera, the supplied memory card is too skimpy -- the 8MB CompactFlash card holds just eight of the largest, best-quality images. Higher-capacity cards pop readily into the CompactFlash Type I slot hidden behind a door at the right rear; Type II cards like IBM's Microdrive won't fit. (A page inserted in the manual adds that a small number of Lexar CF cards won't work; Nikon and Lexar offer free replacements to owners of the incompatible cards.)

A combo port on the camera's left side accepts either the supplied NTSC video-out cable or USB cable for transferring images to your PC. The latter is even easier than with other cameras recognized by Windows Me, 2000, and XP as USB storage devices -- as an alternative to dragging and dropping in Windows Explorer, you can (after installing the supplied Nikon View 4 viewing and cataloguing software) simply push a "Transfer" button on the back of the camera to create a new Nikon View folder containing all the images (or only selected or unselected) images on the memory card.

You can also tell the software -- clearly designed by someone devoted to the colorful buttons of Mac OS X's Aqua interface -- to convert large images to a smaller resolution on the fly, or to upload them to your online folder if you're a member of the free NikonNet service.

A panel on the camera's bottom opens to insert the EN-EL1 battery (one-time-use 2CR5 batteries also work), which recharges in about two hours in the nicely compact, packable (the prongs fold into its AC plug) recharger. Considering the Nikon's small size, battery life is acceptable -- we regularly shot for an hour and a half, using the LCD monitor for most of the time and performing frequent uploads to our Windows 2000 laptop, although the low-battery warning icon appeared after only an hour.

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