Nikon Coolpix P100

Shooting Modes (21.33)

The P100 offers a very complete selection of shooting modes, including a basic auto mode, a scene-recognition-based full auto, SLR-style program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority and full manual shooting, and several specialty modes.

When shooting in standard automatic mode, the camera settings are based strictly on exposure conditions, with only focus mode, exposure compensation, image size and image quality user-adjustable. The scene auto selector mode imposes the same restrictions on user settings, but attempts to figure out what you’re shooting and choose a matching scene mode from six options: portrait, landscape, night portrait, night landscape, close-up and backlight. If there’s no match, the camera shoots in standard auto mode.

In addition to the six scene modes mentioned above, there are another ten options available when the mode dial is set to Scene. In addition to the usual (food, museum, sunset), there’s a copy selection for photographing documents or whiteboards and a backlight selection. For severely backlit situations, the P100 offers a multishot backlight HDR mode, which quickly takes several shoots. The camera saves one frame shot with active D-lighting, and creates a second image by overlaying images taken at different exposure settings. This is similar in concept to the HDR shooting mode that produced impressive results when we shot with the Sony A550 SLR, but our P100 photos taken with backlit HDR didn’t gain much useful detail. The other multishot mode, night landscape, worked better. Pictures we shot handheld at night using this technology were far less blurry than those taken in program mode.

There is also a mode for creating horizontal or vertical multi-shot panoramas. The on-screen display used for lining up the second and subsequent shots is very practical, with a semi-transparent section (about 1/3 of the screen) shown for alignment purposes. Unfortunately, the P100 can’t handle the panorama stitching in-camera, relying instead on supplied computer software.

Smart portrait mode, also available as a mode dial selection, will recognize up the three faces, and automatically take a picture (actually, five pictures if no flash is required), saving the one with the most people smiling. By default, ‘skin softening’ processing is applied, though this can be turned off, or adjusted to one of three settings. There is also a blink proof feature, which takes five shots and attempts to choose one in which nobody has closed eyes.

Subject tracking mode provides continuously updated autofocus once you’ve locked onto a subject, which is certainly valuable, though we question the decision to make it an automated shooting mode (only flash mode, exposure compensation, image quality and size can be adjusted), instead of making it an autofocus option that can be used with program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority and manual exposure modes as well.

When shooting in program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority or manual modes, you can customize most shooting menu options as you like them and store the settings, to be accessed as a group by turning the mode dial to the U (user settings) position.

Auto Mode Features

Focus – There are four basic focus settings: autofocus, macro, infinity and manual focus. In macro mode, you can autofocus as close as 10 cm (4 inches) from the subject.

When shooting in a user-controlled (rather than scene) mode, autofocus can be set to single (the camera focuses when the shutter button is pressed halfway) or full-time AF, where the camera tries to autofocus at all times, even when your finger’s not on the button. It could be useful on occasion, but the battery drain and annoying vibration makes it impractical for day-to-day use.

The tracking mode automatically attempts to follow a subject you’ve locked onto as it moves around the screen. Unfortunately, this is presented as a shooting mode (on the mode dial) rather than a straightforward focus setting, so it’s only available with automated settings (only flash mode, exposure comp, image quality and image size can be adjusted). Enabling subject tracking in a more user-controlled mode, such as aperture or shutter priority shooting, would have been a better strategy.

Face priority can be chosen an autofocus mode, and is set automatically in face portrait, night portrait and smart portrait modes. Up to twelve faces can be recognized.

When it comes to choosing a focusing area, you can let the camera take charge in auto mode, choose the center point, or manually select one of 99 focus points.

The P100 is equipped with a bright red autofocus assist lamp, located in front of the mode dial, right next to the grip.

Exposure – The exposure compensation range is surprisingly narrow, just ±2 EV. Exposure bracketing is available over a three-shot sequence, with intervals of ±0.3 EV, ±0.7 EV or ±1 EV.

As with many Nikon cameras, the P100 is equipped with a version of the company’s Active D-Lighting system, which attempts to digitally process your shots to expand the apparent dynamic range, maintaining detail in high-contrast situations. Since this processing does increase image noise, it is set to Off by default. When used, it can be set to high, normal or low levels.

Metering – The default setting is matrix metering, which analyzes the entire scene for a balanced exposure. Other options are center-weighted, spot and spot AF. which meters the selected autofocus area.

Self-Timer – The self-timer options offer your basic 10-second or 2-second delay, with the autofocus assist lamp blinking during the countdown. It’s odd that there’s no audible feedback letting you know that you’ve pressed the shutter when using the self-timer, though. Until we got used to this peculiarity, we assumed the shutter hadn’t been fully pressed.

Picture Effects (3.50)

The P100 doesn’t provide a lot of fancy filter effects, but you do have five preset color modes (normal, softer, vivid, more vivid, portrait), which are not user-adjustable. There is also a black and white mode which offers more flexibility; you can adjust the contrast and sharpening in b&w, and also apply a virtual monochrome filter, which works the way a physical colored filter does when shooting black and white film. Green softens skin tones, for example, where orange boosts contrast in the sky when shooting landscapes. You can also apply a sepia tone for an old-fashioned effect. If you want to capture both a black and white and a color copy of the image you’re shooting simultaneously, that’s also an option.

Finally, the custom color mode provides five-level adjustments for contrast, sharpening and saturation, though oddly missing is the ability to alter the hue.

Manual Controls (10.90)

Focus – Manual focus is available, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be very useful, since it’s controlled by pressing the up and down buttons on the four-way controller. This may be useful in special circumstances (when shooting on a tripod and trying to get just the right depth of field, for example), but it’s a clumsy process, especially because you have to re-select manual focus for each photo you shoot. On the plus side, a view with the central part of the screen magnified is available as a manual focus assist.

White Balance – In addition to the auto white balance setting, there are presets for daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, cloudy and flash illumination. The fluorescent preset offers sub-menu selections for white fluorescent, daylight/neutral fluorescent and daylight fluorescent; the other presets have fine-tuning options, with three steps toward a bluer hue and three steps toward red in the opposite direction. The white balance menu choices are displayed as an overlay on the current image, so you can preview the effects of your settings changes as you make them.

The manual white balance setting option is easy to use. A rectangle in the middle of the screen is used to frame a white or gray card under current lighting conditions. Press OK and the setting is recorded.

Aperture – The 26x zoom lens offers a reasonably fast f/2.8 maximum aperture at the widest angle setting and f/5.0 at full telephoto. The minimum aperture is limited to f/8.0 no matter what the zoom setting.

Shutter Speed – User-selectable shutter speeds range from 1/2000 second and 8 seconds, at most ISO settings. At higher ISOs, the longest available shutter speed is restricted; it’s 4 seconds at ISO 3200, 2 seconds at ISO 1600 and one second at ISO 3200.

Drive/Burst Mode (7.00)

The P100 performs lots of high- and slow-speed shooting tricks. For starters, there are two full-resolution continuous shooting options. Nikon promises about ten frames per second at the high setting (though with a limit of six shots per burst), and 2.8 fps for up to 200 shots on the low setting. But wait, there’s more.

The BSS (stands for Best Shot Setting) takes up to 10 shots, then analyzes them to find the sharpest one, and stores only that image.

Multi-shot 16 could have been dubbed Golf Swing Mode – it takes 16 shots at about 30fps and combines them into a single picture.

Sport continuous mode is a reduced-res high-speed shooting mode, with virtually no control over camera settings (even ISO is set by the system). The camera shoots at either 120 frames per second (at 1280 × 960 resolution), or 60 frames per second (1600 × 1200 resolution). By default, the frame rate is set automatically (up to 60fps), based on lighting conditions, but this can be overridden by the user. If you stick with the 60fps frame rate, you can activate the pre-shooting cache function, which maintains a constantly refreshed buffer of up to five frames when the shutter is pressed halfway. Then, when the shutter is fully depressed, those frames plus another 20 are recorded at 1600 × 1200 resolution.

Finally, there’s an interval timing mode, a nice option, but the controls are surprisingly limited. You can set the interval between shots to 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes. You can’t set the length of the interval, though, or delay its starting time. The shooting stops when a preset number of shot has been taken, or when you press the shutter a second time.

Shot to Shot (11.8)

The move to a backside illuminated CMOS sensor enabled a tremendous upgrade from the pokey 1.4 frame per second performance of the Nikon P90. Though the company promises, 10 shots per second, our tested results were even better. The P100 rattled off a brisk 12 shots per second in our lab, the fastest performer in our comparison group.