The N800 is a great camera for capturing the shot, color, everything but the framing, the first time UNLESS the settings get wrong, and they do and for reasons I do not understand yet, then when you grab it and try to shoot something in a hurry in an environment you've just shot in, you cant.
IMO, this is because there are WAY too many settings in the menu, including ones that let you completely change the hard buttons and levers around to different settings! flat ridiculous!
I own 6 Nikon different Nikon film cameras from the 80s & 90s whose features many of the digital camera ones are based. If Nikon told me they could if I wanted, make all of the settings interchangeable at my will, i'd reply in disgust "Cram It Clown!" i don't need such crap. but here we are anyway, in trying to please everyone, Nikon, once again, confuses most, pleases none. That's what you get when different aspects of the user interface are compartmentalized and then thrown together in the camera, conflicts and settings that don't even work, a la a half a dozen "features" in Microsoft's Window's 98 the only one I which I can recall offhand being the supposed ability to fax. other software failed because it only half worked and Microsoft's greed, like Streets and Trips, Picture It, Money, Encarta, Web Tv, to name a few.
But I digress. Bottom line: This camera and all Nikon digital SLRs suffer from something I like to call SHIT SCATTERED ALL OVER or "settings" scattered all over, if you prefer. But it's worse than that, most of the settings in the screen menu are not even necessary to have at all because they are well represented all read on the dials and levers, so simply swerve to confuse, and I am convinced, arbitrarily revert to other values without human input.
It's hard enough to learn what the levers and buttons do on this camera. There are plenty of them and they are well laid out. They also cover just about EVERY function there is for taking a picture with a digital camera unless you've unkowingly screwed up the lever and button settings via the screen menu! Because then there are about a million more on the screen menu, some of which conflict with each other.
When you're going through, making settings for the first time, you'll probably do what I did twice, make conflicting settings for which there were no warnings, and the camera stops working! At first I thought it was busted, a lemon a turkey somebody pawned off on me because I did get it cheaper than most on Ebay. But I thought "no way, this is Nikon" and reset it back to default and it started working again, albeit with settings I didn't like.
In the case of having chosen conflicting settings, hunting down the particular setting that caused the malfunction is impossible, so the only solution is a factory reset obliterating all of your settings and starting over and hoping you don't make the same mistake a third time.
menu issues: it's not only that there is an inordinate amount of them, but also that they are scattered everywhere. For instance, there are ISO settings in SEVERAL locations. There are ridiculous settings where such as the one where I can either have stop increments at 1/3 or 1/2 stop. Apparently with that setting Nikon i is trying to appeal to the bottom 3% of the most anal Nikon users on the planet who actually hallucinate that they can see the difference between a 1/3 and 1/2 stop! I mean even if there are human beings who can actually tell the difference, then the OBVIOUS solution is to make it 1/3 and leave it htere3, no option to change it to anything else. that way the anal beads of the world who happen to use Nikon cameras are satisfied and so are the rest of us!
But I guess that simple fact is WAY too obvious for Nikon software programmers and their bosses to comprehend.
So until Nikon extinguishes it's fetish for SSAO, though I use them with difficulty, I DO NOT Recommend the Nikon Dxxx line of digital cameras to anyone who loaths unnecessarily complicated , jumbled up, ridiculous menus on camera equipment
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