Nikon Coolpix P80

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49297355,00.htm

Reviewed 19 June 2008

Reviewed by Lori Grunin

It's a bird; it's a plane; it's a superzoom. Nikon's latest edition to its Coolpix range is the P80, sporting a 18x zoom lens and some nice features. Available for around £230, would you nab this snapper out of the sky?

Design
For superzoom shooters, the Coolpix P80's 27-486mm-equivalent, f/2.8-4.5 lens likely sits at the top of its list of 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.

A mode dial makes it easy to get to select shooting modes -- manual, aperture- and shutter-priority, Program and scene exposure

Weighing almost 365g, the P80 is no featherweight, but that's common for this class. It's relatively compact, with a comfortable rubberized grip and thumb rest.

The 69mm (2.7-inch) LCD is pretty good. It has a wide viewing angle and doesn't wash out in direct sunlight. It's supplemented with an electronic viewfinder. Both displays update fast enough so that they don't interfere with shooting, although the EVF only displays 97 per cent of the scene, compared with 100 per cent for the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.

Features
Like its competitors, you summon most of the frequently used shooting controls via a dedicated button, including exposure compensation, focus modes, self-timer and flash. You can also navigate via the back dial, which also controls your shutter, aperture and exposure compensation adjustments in the various shooting modes. The display and LCD/EVF toggle buttons feel oddly small given the size of the camera, though.

Other controls you access from the shooting menu. Most notable are an array of ISO sensitivity options. Given how aggressive the blurring gets at ISO 400 -- more on that later -- we suggest you stick with the 64-200 modes if you're going to use the automatic mode.

The navigation switch is large, with a clear, tactile delineation between the inner OK button and the outer navigation controls. The body, though made of textured black plastic, doesn't feel particularly cheap or fragile

In addition to matrix, centre-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 centre. As usual with these technologies, we find 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 centre-focus-and-recompose approach, albeit old fashioned, is still the most efficient. Other shooting options include image size and quality, 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.

Performance
Unfortunately, the P80's performance is quite disappointing. Its 2.9 seconds to wake up and shoot isn't awful for a megazoom, but the 1.1 seconds it takes to focus and shoot in decent light is slow for any class. In low-contrast circumstances, its 1.4-second time is closer to average.

The camera has a high shot-to-shot time of 2.4 seconds, which seems 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 comes 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.

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 FZ18.

Zooming doesn't feel smooth; it vibrates disconcertingly as you zoom through the range. However, it's responsive, given that it's stepped and the optical image stabiliser works as well as we've seen from Nikon's other VR lenses.

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

While the battery didn't conk out too soon, its 250-shot-per-charge rating seems underpowered compared with the FZ18's 400 shots or the Canon PowerShot S5 IS's 450 shots (with AA batteries).
 
Image quality
The 10-megapixel P80's strongest point seems to be the saturated, more-frequently-than-not spot-on colours. Exposures tend to be quite good, though in bright sunlight it seems 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 recent Coolpix S600 or older Coolpix P5000 or 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. Depending upon what you shoot, the P80's photos can range from great to just okay. 

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

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday