Nikon Coolpix S1000pj

Viewfinder (0.00)

There is no viewfinder on the S1000pj; everything is done through the LCD screen.

Display (8.15)

The screen on the back of the S1000pj is a 2.7-inch screen with a resolution of 230k pixels. That’s a decent size, but the resolution is a little on the low side, which gives s a slightly grainy look. It is, however, generally adequate and looks good in everything but direct sunlight.

Flash (4.00)

The small flash is located just to the right of the lens, just above the cover of the projector. We found that this flash was very low powered: in total darkness, it only illuminated out to about 6 or 7 feet. That makes it good enough for shooting a flash portrait, but not for capturing animals at the watering hole. This placement of the flash also meant that there was a tendency towards s showing red-eye. The camera tries to deal with this with a red-eye flash mode which uses two short pre-flashes, which works reasonably well.

Lens (3.00)

The S1000pj has a 5x zoom lens built into the camera body: the lens does not protrude from the camera body at all during use. This has a decent zoom range, going from 5mm to 25mm, which is equivalent to a 28mm to 1400m zoom on a 35mm film camera.That provides both a very decent wide angle and enough of a zoom to get in close to the action.

The aperture range of this zoom lens is limited, though: the widest aperture is f/3.9 at the wide zoom setting and f/5.8 at the telephoto end. Below are examples of 3 points on the zoom range.

Zoom Ratio Examples
5.0 mm	8.0 mm	25.0 mm

Battery (5.00)

The S1000pj is powered by a small Lithium Ion battery; the EN-EL12. This holds about 1050 mAh of charge, which is on the low side. Nikon claims a battery life of about 220 shots, and that seems about right; we were able to shoot for a couple of days before the battery ran out of juice. The projector does seem to use a lot of charge, though; running this ran through the battery at a much faster rate than using the screen.

Memory (3.00)

s and video taken by the S1000pj are stored on an SDHC or SD Card that fits into a slot above the battery. A 4 GB SDHC card (which costs about $25) will hold over 8000 s or about 11 minutes of video at the highest resolution and quality setting.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs (2.00)

The S1000pj connects to the outside world through a single port on the side of the camera body, under a small plastic cover. This port provides for a USB connection (with the included cable) or an analog video output through the included composite video and audio output cable. No option is provided for digital video output from this camera.

Other Hardware (0.00)

Projector

The projector is built into the front of the camera and is activated by the button on the left of the top. The slider next to this provides the focus control; the projector can be focused down to a distance of about 12 inches, which produces an about 4 inches across. The LED light source that drives the projector produces about 10 lumens of brightness, which means it is not bright; it is invisible in daylight. To be able to see the properly, you need to be in a darkened room with light colored walls. This means it would work fine at a party or in a restaurant, but not at the beach or in the office. The distance that you project the also makes a difference: the longer the distance, the dimmer the is.

The is also rather low in resolution: at 640 by 480 pixels, the images are significantly grainier than the screen. Both still images and video can be projected, though, and these have decent contrast if they are not projected too far and the surface is white.

To show the projector in action, we took a number of photos in different lighting conditions. In all of the photos below, the projector is projecting onto a white wall from a distance of 4 feet.

As you can see from these examples, the projected image looks good in a dark room, but quickly gets pale and wan with any sort of light. The second image was taken with a single light source in the room, so it’s about what you would expect in a darkened restaurant or at a party for goths or vampires. The last photo was taken with typical office light sources on, and the image is barely visible.

Although the projector is limited, it is kind of fun. When I was testing the camera and someone asked me a question about my dog in a restaurant, I was able to pull the camera out and project a couple of photos and a video I had taken that afternoon onto the tablecloth. As long as the room is dark, it can project an image out to several feet that can be clearly seen. Just don’t expect it to work in anything but dim light.