Nikon Coolpix P7700 Digital Camera Review

Chromatic Aberration

Atypically for a compact camera, the P7700 lets you shoot with distortion control on or off. Most point and shoot models simply apply such corrections without asking, since lenses designed for tiny sensors tend to produce monstrous distortions. While we want to give kudos to Nikon for giving us the option, we still shot our tests with corrections turned on in order to level the playing field.

Chromatic aberrations weren't a notable problem for the P7700, never exceeding one pixel width in our lab testing and generally going completely unnoticed. In this regard, it bested all of its direct competitors, if only slightly—really, they're all quite good, though the Olympus XZ-2 could probably stand to do a little better. Out in the real world, the results matched our lab testing, except in the most extreme cases. Occasionally, such as when shooting foliage against a bright blue sky, the P7700 would produce relatively thick blue/purple halos around leaves, but this was about the worst we could find.

Distortion

Geometric distortion is also exceptionally well controlled, displaying just -0.37% barrel distortion at full wide angle. This flips to very mild pincushion at middle focal lengths (0.13% at 14mm), before returning to a very, very slight barrel distortion at full telephoto (-0.11%). Getting barrel distortion at telephoto focal lengths is pretty rare, which leads us to believe that the P7700 is doing some pretty serious correction here, but the results look good so we don't really mind.