Nikon CoolPix P5000 First Impressions Review

by Emily Raymond
Published on March 10, 2007

Navigation
Intro	Physical Tour
Components	Design/Layout
Modes	Control Options
Image Parameters	Connectivity/Extras
Overall Impressions	Conclusion
Specs	Photo Gallery

 
 

The Nikon Coolpix P5000 has manual and priority modes, and manual controls that can be changed with the control dial and multi-selector. The following sections are chock-full of info about the details of the manual controls.

 

Auto Focus
The Nikon Coolpix P5000 is marketed as a performance digital camera for serious photographers, so its auto focus system should be snappy. This wasn’t the case on the preproduction model, but it is far from being finalized. It took lots of time to process just about everything, so shutter lag was an issue. This should be fixed by the time the camera enters the market though.

 

The specs indicate that the lens can focus from 1.6 inches in the macro mode and 1 ft normally. The camera has Auto, Manual, and Center auto focus area modes, although the manual setting didn’t work on the preproduction model.

 

The P5000 has an orange auto focus assist lamp that can be turned on and off in the setup menu. There is also a Best Shot Selector (BSS) in the recording menu that snaps a string of photos and selects only the sharpest one to save.

 

There is a Face Priority Auto Focus mode, but it is positioned as its own scene mode on this camera. It didn’t work very well at all – and I doubt this is a preproduction phenomenon because it performs similarly on other Coolpix models. It takes a few seconds for the camera to recognize a face and still doesn’t get it right all the time. While playing with it at the show, it recognized a pile of CDs as a face and placed a big yellow smiley face over it.

 

Manual Focus
Manual focus is not available on the Nikon Coolpix P5000.

 

ISO

In the recording menu, users can scroll between a wide range of ISO sensitivity settings. 64, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200 settings can be found, with the top ISO setting operating only when the image size shrinks to 5 megapixels. The image size did not indicate that it shrank when I activated the ISO 3200 setting on the preproduction model, but the specs indicate that it will. The automatic ISO mode has a somewhat wide range of 64-800, which doesn’t cover all the bases of the manual settings but is still more than the average camera’s automatic ISO range of 80-400.

 

There are only seven white balance options in the recording menu. They can be scrolled through there or set to the Function button so they can be changed with the control dial. Auto, Preset (custom), Daylight, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Cloudy, and Flash can be found. This list isn’t very extensive at all; some cameras have 3 fluorescent preset modes and a shade mode. The custom setting is more important though, as it can adjust to any lighting situation.

 

The P5000 has manual exposure control with the shutter speeds and apertures available for change. Like other digital cameras, there is also an exposure compensation scale of +/- 2 in steps of 1/3. A live histogram can be viewed while shooting and in the playback mode, so the exposure can be monitored even in harsh lighting. In the playback mode, users can activate Nikon’s D-Lighting to automatically brighten underexposed images.

 

The Coolpix P5000 has a 256-zone metering system with evaluative, center-weighted, and spot modes. These are typical, but the camera also has a spot auto focus mode that syncs with the auto focus point and doesn’t stick to the center like the standard spot metering mode. The metering modes are found in the recording menu.

 

The Nikon Coolpix P5000 has shutter speeds ranging from 8-1/1000th of a second that can be changed in the manual and shutter priority modes. This seems a little short for adventurous photographers who want to capture the night sky or get creative with long exposures.

 

When the 3.5x optical zoom lens is zoomed out, the most aperture choices are available: f/2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.8, 4.3, 4.8, 5.4, 6.1, 6.8, and 7.6. The maximum aperture is quite large and lets in a lot of light. The light wanes in the telephoto end of the zoom range though: f/5.3, 5.8, 6.5, and 7.3. The aperture can be selected in the manual and aperture priority modes.