Nikon COOLPIX P4 VR Digital Camera Review

by

  GoldenHammer

Long Expected Camera I have been a serious amateur spent most of my time with DSLR camera, however, I have been long looking for a point and shoot handy camera too that is capable of taking night light or indoor photo at reasonable quality with easy of control. First Impression After some initial review and impression with the Nikon's (Vibration Reduction) VR technology, I decided to get the Nikon COOLPIX P4 VR digital camera, which delivers up to 8.1 mega pixels image with a 3.5x optical zoom lens covering focus length 36mm-126mm. See also Canon Digital IXUS 800 IS Digital Camera Review P4 is a handy digital camera fitting well in my hand; it has design to enable one-hand (the right hand) operations. It is packed in a strong and substantial, sliver-colored metal case with smoothly shaped edges and corners. This gives really good handling experience for your hands. The beautiful and well-built outlook simply tells everyone it is a high-tech and well-design digital camera. So what is the quality of my very first shots created by P4? These are quick snaps by one-hand operation. I took them just after leaving the camera shop where I purchased my P4. I just let it running in full auto mode without any optimized setting at the moment, with the VR on, resized to 600 pixels. Distortion and noise level are acceptable to my eyes and the photos are fairly nice enough among the best image quality produced under similar scenes by point and shoot digital cameras. The following are 100% cornor crop from the original source images: The Best How well is the VR feature performed? The VR does help my shooting experience, after making hundreds of shots, I am able to create sharp image at 1/30s in most case (one-hand operations) and sometimes at 1/15s or even 1/8s. I found it gives about 1-stop advantage when framing under low light condition. To my surprise, P4 provides a programmed mode (P) and aperture priority mode (A) that allows additional parameters changes not available in the full auto mode such as white balance, ISO sensitivity, metering, contrast and sharpening effects. I find the aperture priority mode useful as I shoot most often in this mode, the aperture can be set between f/2.7 - f/7.6 at the wide side and f/5.3 - f/7.3 at the tele side. I quickly fall in love with the exposure compensation mode that can be entered easily by a simple push to the left side on 4-ways navigator selector. Nikon makes this a very nice and effective arrangement, the histogram at the left refreshes instantly after you make a shot and point the camera to another subject, it returns automatically to the exposure compensation mode with the new histogram, and you may decide to make any compensation again. An exposure compensation from -2EV to +2EV at a step of 0.3EV maybe set, you are also able to select among combinations of aperture vs shutter speed when you are in the P mode or only the aperture in the A mode. P4's Best Shot Selector (BSS) is a valuable add-on feature that allows taking up to 10 photos in a series of continuous shots, only the sharpest photo in the series will be saved, all others are discarded, cool?! This is really helpful in my case as I would shoot indoor under poor light condition, the BSS with continuously shooting mode, at about 1.8fps, help a lot to make a fairly nice photo without the requirement for flash light and the setup of tripod. I am also impressed by the ISO50 sensitivity provided by P4 for delivering almost noise free photo image under a nice lighting environment, and also good when creating a quality long exposured photo. P4 has a very fast power on start up and auto focusing. It can start to work in less than one second after you press the power on button and in most case P4 gives a focus lock in half second or at most within 1 second for a longer zoom range. P4 provides a rich set of scene modes, in particular, for portrait work in with various effects and environment like indoor and night. I also like some of other scenes modes like panorama assist, night landscape, sunset, fireworks show, close up, museum and sports. Nikon had tried to pack every possible scene into this little camera. Excellent user manual, it covers details in good organization, a handy reference with rich explanations not only helpful to novice but also serious amateur photographers. Room for Improvement Firstly, VR feature is expected to work more effectively for 2-3 stops advantages, however, in most case I found it may only help push 1 stop up. Secondly, I would really like to have a low noise ISO800 sensitivity to further improve the shooting experience under low light and for motion scene. Lastly, though P4 provides up to 4 seconds explosure for the Firework and Night Landscape scenes, as a serious amateur, I find the P4's shutter speed, ranging from 1/500s to 2s in the A mode, rather a limitation. I would like up to 10 seconds exposure at ISO50 for faming some of my favorite night scenes in the A mode. Conclusion P4 is the best point and shoot digital camera on my hands up to the moment, P4 is a recommended handy digital camera packed with rich set of features specified for improving everyday point and shoot experience. Reference Official product information is available at http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/digitalcamera/coolpix/p4/index.htm