Nikon Coolpix P80 Review

Good review. Comprehensive with well-explained reasons for every one of your conclusions. Although your scores for the Nikon P80 are much higher than your scores for the Fuji S8100 and Sony H50, a detailed reading of all three reviews reveals that the Nikon P80 is inferior to the other two, especially in terms of picture quality. Since you gave the Sony a 7 and the Fuji a 6, the Nikon P80 deserves a 5 at best.

I found the feedbacks extremely helpful; in contrast to what a sales chap advised & recommended to me this afternoon for a shopping Saturday in search of a handy size with close matching performance to the higher end models within the DSLR range and the Nikon Coolpix P80 comes 2nd to the preferred choice i.e. the Lumix FZ18... yeah, a 2007 model.. and after seeing the launch intro to be this month, I'm now tempted to pit the Panasonic to that of the Fuji 9600... Nikon's P80 certainly lost my cool vote!

I just bought a P80 (at a closeout price) after being dissatisfied with the poor low light performance of my Panasonic FX500 while shooting a sunset. I was looking at the Fuji 8100, Nikon P80, and Olympus SP570 bridge cameras because they all have manual controls, an EVF for bright sunlight when the LCD is hard to see, and lenses wider than 28mm. I liked the handling and design (and small size) of the Nikon the best, and although the reviews on it are iffy, the test shots at the review sites from it still looked the best of the three to me, so I decided to give it a try, figuring I could return it if I didn't like it. Well, I love it! It's just as quick as other compact cameras I've used, has great color (you can tell I'm American by my spelling of that word), accurate exposures, a sharp lens, and quite impressive zoom reach. The autofocus seems to work well in bright enough light for hand holding at the long end of the zoom and in extremely low light at the wide end, as long as I use center autofocus instead of multipoint autofocus, which tends to hunt a lot, especially when used at the long end of the zoom. Noise is as well controlled up to ISO 200 as other compact cameras I've used and the overall experience is quite fun, with impressive images at both ends of the zoom range. I even made sure I tried it right away on a sunset and even in that low light setting (after the sun had gone below the horizon lighting the clouds with nice colors) the autofocus, dynamic range, noise control and metering were great (for a compact camera). I couldn't be happier with this camera. I should point out that I always use ISOs of 200 or less (for quality images) and aperture priority mode because it gives me the easiest control of aperture and shutter speeds so I can't comment on the performance with auto and scene modes or auto or high ISO. And the normal and vivid color modes are pretty close in saturation and contrast, while the more vivid mode is too saturated and contrasty, reducing shadow details and looking too processed to my eyes. I haven't tried the distortion control or dynamic range enhancements, but I like the way the DR is applied to an image after it's saved, saving the original image too. It seems to me that reviewers are extremely hard on Nikon compact cameras because their SLRs are so good, expecting their compact cameras to be equally superior, and when they only perform as good or slightly better than other compacts, but not as good as Nikon SLRs, then they're too critical in their judgement. I've come to be suspicious of reviews anyway, as some cameras that don't get real good reviews have great looking images to me, while other cameras that get good reviews don't look that good to me. That's why I only buy from places that have a liberal return policy if I am not happy with my purchase. Overall, the P80 is an excellent buy in my opinion. Since it's been replaced by the P90, the price is falling, making it an even better buy.