If there is one thing I do a lot of, it’s taking pictures. I love exploring new places, and remembering those adventures with the perfect shot. Up to now, I have been satisfied being in the point and shoot camp but after having poorly exposed pictures on my trip to the Sawtooths, I needed something I can set to get great photos while out in the field. I took a good long look at the D-SLR packages, but they had a few real shortcomings:
- The camera is expensive – just the body!
- The lenses are expensive
- The kit is pretty heavy
- Not really appropriate for a hike, unless you consider the added calories burned carrying the extra weight!
- Due to a mechanical nature, battery life is not impressive
So I decided I needed a point and shoot with a nice big zoom, and manual settings for everything. Being a videographer as well, I wanted a unit which could film in 1080 HD. Enter the new Nikon P100. I can say right off the bat that I love this camera. It certainly has all features I have been looking for (manual, lightweight, portable, big zoom, HD) but also has a load of automatic settings. Not being any kind of photography genius, my summary revolves around the ease of use of this camera. Detailed specs can be found at the Nikon site.
If you visited the link, you will note that it has Hybrid VR (vibration reduction) technology which will make photos easier to shoot while hand holding the camera. I have found that I like this to a point, but it seems to affect the photo quality when I zoom in on the captured picture. I have decided that for the way I shoot, it will be tripod mounted. One really interesting feature to me is the way you can shoot video using a dedicated button. The skinny on how that works for me – I frame my initial shot using auto or manual controls (focus, zoom). When I am ready, I hit the video record button and the camera freezes these settings and you are recording in beautiful high-definition. Understand, however, you can set the camera to auto focus, and you can zoom in and out while recording, but the results are hard to watch, and you can hear the focusing motor through the built in stereo microphones.
The color reproduction is fantastic and the movie mode is fluid high-end looking. The on-screen menu system is very straight-forward, and easy to memorize. Pop into automatic mode, and this is as easy as any pocket point and shoot. Put the camera in SP or AP and now you can completely control your shot.
I have included a few samples so you can see what I have been able to capture with this camera in the last week playing with this camera. As a true amateur photographer, my results can be seen as typical for other first time buyers for higher end automatic cameras.
YouTube movie I made on Easter…
EDIT: After one week, I returned this camera. While it had fantastic image and video quality, it suffered from what appears to be a common problem of random freezing of the focus and zoom mechanicals. The solution is wait until the camera times out and powers off. Powering it back on restores the function. Unfortunately, trust in my tool is pretty important when shooting. A firmware update MAY possibly fix this, but I went on instead to purchase the Canon SX20 IS. I will provide an opinion after I’ve had it for a month or more.
