Tuesday, October 9, 2012

In My Humble Opinion

Having recently purchased a Nikon P510 I have been asked the normal questions about why I bought that particular camera . So although I am in no way a professional reviewer here are some of the reasons for this purchase.

At 4.3 to 180 the camera has a tremendous zoom lens. The 35 mm equivalent is 24 to 1000. There is also a 2x digital zoom giving you a 2000 mm lens. I am not sure I will use the 2x much because digital zooms just crop and expand the picture. (a topic for another blog entry)

It is much lighter than a DSLR. The P510 weights in at just under 20 ozs while a D90 body alone weights 22 oz. Then you have to factor in the lens that you would need to carry to be equivalent to the lens on the P510. Not having to carry those lens is another factor I considered.

It gave me a lot of the features that a standard point and shoot does not have. Besides the standard array of preset scene settings the camera gives you the ability to control your exposure. There is a full manual mode as well as aperture and shutter priority settings. You also have the ability for manual focus which comes in handy when the auto focus has a hard time locking on. I have found this happens mostly under low light situations. It also has a rather quick burst setting for a compact digital. In normal usage it get about 5 frames per second. There are some faster settings but it seems to me that 5 frames per second is about the best.

You also can control the ISO settings from 100 to 6400. Although above 1000 starts to get grainy I have seen good results in the 800 to 1000 range. There is also a couple of auto settings allowing the camera to pick between an ISO of 100 to 800.

Although there are, of course, some shortcomings over a DSLR this camera seems to give me what I was looking for in a light weight, easy to carry camera. If you are looking for a super zoom compact camera you might want to add this to your short list. (In My Humble Opinion)


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