By Lori Grunin
22/12/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39005881,43186443p,00.htm

Frequent travelers will know the importance of needing a camera with both wide-angle lenses and telephoto optics. While a dSLR may come to your mind now, there is a class of shooters in-between point-and-shoots and its interchangeable lens siblings: Megazoom cameras. Typically, these snappers were seen as bulky devices, but Nikon's Coolpix P80 is touted to be the world's smallest 18x zoom shooter, and it has a good set of features to satisfy enthusiasts. However, its less-than-satisfactory image quality may not go down well with fussy shutterbugs.

Design

For megazoom shooters, the Nikon Coolpix P80's 18x zoom, 27-486mm F2.8-4.5 lens likely sits at the top of the list of the P80's attractions. The range provides a good combination of wide-angle and telephoto views at relatively wide maximum aperture values. Nikon supports the lens with an agreeable and functional design. Weighing 365g, the P80 is no feather, but that is common for megazoom shooters. The P80 is relatively compact, with a comfortable rubberized grip and thumbrest.

Our one pet peeve, which we've mentioned with regard to other cameras, was having to access the setup menu from the dial. We found ourselves hitting the menu button to make it go away, ineffectively, of course. If you only had to go into the menu once during the initial setup, it wouldn't be so annoying. However, that's where the Format function resides, and you have to perform this operation regularly to maintain your memory card.

Like its competitors, you call up most of the frequently used shooting controls via a dedicated button, including exposure compensation, focus modes (macro, infinity, and manual), self-timer, and flash (including red-eye reduction, fill, slow sync, and rear curtain sync). You can also navigate via the back dial, which also controls your shutter, aperture, and exposure-compensation adjustments in various shooting modes. The display and LCD/EVF toggle buttons felt oddly small given the size of the camera, though.

Features

In addition to matrix, center-weighted, and spot metering, the P80 offers spot-AF area for use with the AF-area modes. The AF-area modes include face priority, auto, manual, and center. As usual with these technologies, we found the face-priority setting too inefficient, the auto makes undesirable choices, and the manual AF-point selection is only useful if you're shooting the same composition repeatedly. The center-focus-and-recompose approach, albeit old fashioned, is still the most efficient. Other shooting options include image size and quality, Optimize image (custom and preset settings for contrast, sharpening, and saturation), white balance, single or full-time AF, flash exposure compensation, noise reduction, and distortion control (which reduces frame size). Lack of support for RAW files is a big hole in the feature set, though.

For ISO sensitivities, there is Auto and manual 64 through 6,400 (ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400 are reduced resolution modes). The shooter offers High ISO sensitivity Auto (64-1,600) and Fixed-range auto, which lets you choose one of three ranges: ISO 64-100, 64-200 or 64-400. Given how aggressive the blurring gets at ISO 400, we suggest you stick with the 64-200 modes if you're going to use the automatic mode.

The P80's lens isn't bad. Barrel distortion is about what you'd expect at the widest angle of 27mm-equivalent, however, it exhibits visibly more pincushioning in the middle of the range (around 150mm-equivalent) than the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. Zooming doesn't feel smooth, it vibrates a little disconcertingly as you zoom through the range. However, it's responsive, given that it's stepped (as most megazooms are). The optical image stabilizer works as well as we've seen from Nikon's other VR lenses.

The 2.7-inch LCD is pretty good. The screen has a wide viewing angle and didn't wash out in direct sunlight. It's supplemented with an electronic viewfinder (EVF). Both displays update fast enough so that they don't interfere with shooting, although the EVF only displays 97 percent of the scene, compared with 100 percent for the FZ18.

For movie capture, the P80 also offers a neat time-lapse mode, though we wish we could choose shorter intervals than 30 seconds. There's also a 30fps VGA movie mode, which produces reasonable AVI clips at a bitrate of about 1.1MB per second, but it's pretty limited: No optical zoom or VR available while shooting.

Performance

Unfortunately, the P80's performance was quite disappointing. Its 2.9 seconds to wake up and shoot isn't awful for a megazoom, but the 1.1 seconds it took to focus and shoot in decent light is slow for any class. In low-contrast circumstances, its 1.4-second time was closer to average. The camera had a concomitantly high shot-to-shot time of 2.4 seconds, which seemed to be fueled by slow memory writes. While the 2.8-second flash shot-to-shot performance may not be worst in class, it's still on the high side. Burst shooting, at a typical rate of 1.3 frames per second, also came in near the bottom of its class. In practice, the slow performance means the subject can move or someone can walk into the frame of the photo before you get the shot. It's definitely not your best choice for shooting sports, children, or animals.

While the battery didn't conk out too soon, its 250-shot-per-charge rating (CIPA standard) seems underpowered compared with the FZ18's 400 shots or the Canon PowerShot S5 IS's 450 shots (with AA nickel metal hydride batteries).

Image Quality

As frequently happens, we were ambivalent about the photo-quality rating. The 10-megapixel P80's strongest point seemed to be the saturated, more-frequently-than-not spot-on colors. Exposures tended to be quite good, though in bright sunlight it seemed to produce more than its share of blown-out highlights. But even when printed, the photos had a slightly crunchy digital look that we didn't see in shots from other cameras--including the Coolpix S600 or Coolpix P5000, as well as other megazooms such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H10. Furthermore, Nikon's aggressive noise suppression kicks in at ISO 400 and blurs most of the detail away. If you have a lot of detail in your scene, the photos are borderline at ISO 400 and unusable by ISO 800. So depending upon what you shoot, the P80's photos can range from great to just OK.

Among the handful of 18x megazoom models--the Panasonic FZ18, old-ish Olympus SP-560UZ and the Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd--the Nikon Coolpix P80 ranked as one of the better ones. But if speed and solid high-ISO photo quality are really important, consider stepping up to a dSLR with configurable lenses.