While it’s easy enough for a beginner to capture great images, the real attraction of the Nikon Coolpix P3 is you can go a bit beyond its automatic control; creating rather than merely capturing images.
Nikon’s Feature System helps the novice use the Coolpix P3, but tools like Vibration Reduction and fast shot-to-shot options make more choices available to anyone who turns them on. And with Wireless G transfers and printing, the Nikon Coolpix P3 is convenient and fun, too.
Not a bad feature set to pack in your pocket or purse, and certainly a Dave’s Pick for its image quality, solid styling and enough options to make the Nikon Coolpix P3 a serious power photo tool.
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The Nikon Coolpix P3 is an eight megapixel digital camera. It has a 3.5x optical zoom lens and also offers image stabilisation. Possibly its biggest attraction is that it is WiFi enabled. This means that as long as your computer is also WiFi enabled you can transmit images from the Coolpix P3 to your computer without the need for a cable.
Other features include ISO sensitivity (auto, 50, 100, 200 and 400), bracketing and white balance bracketing, exposure compensation (+/- 2 in 1/3 steps), metering (matrix, centre weighted, spot and spot AF area) and white balance (auto, white balance preset, sunlight, incandescent, fluorescent, cloudy, shade and flash). You can also fine tune saturation, sharpness and contrast.
After a photo has been taken you can make a smaller copy and also add up to 20 seconds of voice memo to it. If you feel a picture is too dark there is also a feature called D lighting that will brighten the picture for you.
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The Nikon Coolpix P3’s excellent image quality impresses us far more than its wireless abilities. With optical vibration reduction (VR), the P3 is a great snapshooter that should please discriminating users.
The P3’s performance is disappointing, with some infuriating delays between shots. The camera takes slightly more than 4 seconds to turn on and shoot, and performance goes downhill from there. Shutter lag in bright light was an irritating 0.9 second, with dim light bumping that time up to 1.4 seconds. After taking a shot, it was a full 3 seconds before we could snap off another one. Burst mode was acceptable, with a rate of 1.5fps in five-shot bursts. The screen refreshes quickly but has a narrow viewing angle. Unfortunately, users are stuck with the LCD; the P3 lacks an optical viewfinder.
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There are many cameras in the market today that offer “anti-handshake” via optical lens shifting and one of them is the Nikon VR (Vibration Reduction) technology. While Nikon’s VR technology has always been available in its DSLR and prosumer series of cameras, it was not until the release of the Nikon Coolpix P3 at PMA 2006 did Nikon finally joined the competition in offering compacts with “anti-handshake” technology. P3 offers not one but two different VR modes: Active and Normal. The Normal VR mode should suffice in most occasions while Active mode works best when conditions are a bit more topsy-turvy such as trying to capture a cool-looking Mazda RX8 on the road while in motion.
Like the Nikon Coolpix S6, the P3 is also endowed with wireless connectivity, thereby allowing users to conveniently transfer photos wirelessly to any computer with wireless connection, wireless router or access point (in infrastructure mode), and wireless printing.
To sum up, the P3 is a pretty handy camera that is well capable of helping you capture precious memories in vivid digital impressions. Of course, the noteworthy points are the VR modes and Wi-Fi connection, which considering its small and highly manageable form for ease of use when on the go means the P3 is definitely worthy of a consideration.
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So, the Nikon Coolpix P3 is jammed with goodies, but how good are the results? For a kick off the detail it’s possible to capture is superb, the lens and CCD working well together. I’ve discussed the AF system which works well (though macro focusing was a challenge on some subjects) while the metering (all 256-segments of it) works a treat too, though some images were mystifyingly overexposed and I did not get to the bottom of the problem. It’s probably me though.
Noise is controlled well at all sensitivities up to ISO 200, at ISO 400 things get a tad noisier than I’d like and the limited sensitivity available (ISO 400 is the top setting) is attributable to the camera possessing VR; you don’t need the higher settings to get a reasonable shot in lower lighting. All those lovely images can be stored either on the 23MB of internal memory or on external SD/MMC storage.
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