I tried this camera this week, and found myself returning it within a couple days. In all honesty, I had read good things and I had hoped perhaps this would serve me as a bridge camera between my Canon G9 and my dSLR camera.
First, it is nicely made, and feels good in the hand. It works smoothly, and is relatively quiet during operation. The lens is high quality, and it has the standard Nikon layout on the selection dial. Curiously, it maintains the separate setting on the dial for SETTINGS which should be standard for all creative zone options. This is similar to all other recent Nikon cameras.
In use, the camera feels more like a point and shoot than a true tool of the trade -- and therein my average review. If you are working your way up from a point and shoot and not quite ready for a dSLR, this might be the camera for you.
But based on my observations: the camera had a difficult time focusing in low-light conditions, and then defaults to grainy high ISO defaults -- sure you can
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set that, or use Manual mode, but it won't work right out of the box in auto or Programmed Auto or Aperture or Shutter mode.
The image quality is fair -- many photos needed saturation boosts -- they just seemed bland out of the box. Again, this is programmable, for those who venture into the menu, or those who like playing with photoshop.
In general, all photos looked soft, and they all need sharpening in photoshop. This is something I would clearly not want to waste my time on with every photo taken that I might want to use for print purposes. The image quality just us NOT what you would expect with a camera of this price. That being said -- the image quality is consistent from closeup to faraway landscape. There is no noticeable loss of IQ with longer focal distance shots, which is better than most superzoom compact cameras I have seen. Closeup macro shots appear the sharpest: if you like taking photos of bees on flower blossoms, this is your baby.
While the photos do not lose IQ at the far range of the considerable 18x optical zoom -- they suffer from severe purple fringing at that end -- worse than many other superzoom ultraportables I have seen.
The VR works as promised -- provided you are moving and your subject is not moving. I couldn't get clear images of moving objects without significant futzing with the settings.
The shutter lag is considerable, nowhere near the rapid response of a dSLR -- and compared to my Canon G9, significantly slower than that as well.
This compares favorably to the Canon S5 and might in fact be better than that camera -- but the image quality is not better than the Canon G9, which remains the absolutely best Image Quality camera out there at this price point (without the zoom lens, of course).
I'm not going to rant and rave and say this is a terrible camera -- it just seems incredibly average at this price range -- take a look at the Canon G9 for faster shutter speed, better image quality, and similar manual control.
I will say one thing -- for those who like to isolate their subject from the background (i.e. blur your background, with good depth of field) the Nikon P80 excels at that -- I haven't quite seen as nice aperture priority images in a point-and-shoot as I have with this camera.
But overall, it's a highly priced point and shoot, which won't satisfy advanced camera users.
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