Nikon Coolpix P5000

I was looking for a small portable camera to complement my Nikon D70 and D80 DSLR. Small enough to fit in my pocket or on my belt, light enough to always have with me, yet have advanced capabilities and produce good quality photos when I did not have a DSLR with me.
I have tried many cameras from Nikon and Canon. The P5000 has the right set of features and price to meet my needs. The Canon G7 does have some superior features, but is larger and weighs more so does not fit in my shirt pocket but OK in coat pocket, and is ~$100 more. I have had the P5000 for almost a week and it has been on my belt in the leather case every day. Very travel friendly. I also have the small light SB-400 iTTL Flash in my brief case to add more Flash capability and it is great.

Picture quality is finally what has to be good. The P5000 produces very good IQ with that "Nikon Color" I am used to. I tested the P5000 in good lighting versus my Nikon D80, Nikon S7c and CoolPix 5400. The D80 wins hands down as the best quality. But the P5000 is much better that my other CoolPix. Plus going back and forth from the D80 to the P5000 was smooth due to button placement and similar shooting style. The hand grip on the P5000 is excellent for such a small camera too. I have posted my test pictures on another site if you look at Nikon Talk Forum on DPreview dot com and search for "P5000 vs S7c vs 5400 First Impressions"

Cheers

I have had my P5000 for less than a week and really am impressed with it. The color is good, the photo quality is good. For such a small camera, it has good ergonomics and most functions are easily accessed by by buttons or dials. It has full manual controls and noise levels are very good for a 10 MP camera. The VR stabilizing function works well. It makes the perfect accompaniment to my D50 and D70 when I need a smaller purse or pocket-sized camera.

I've had this for a couple of days and love it! Its a great point and shoot, provides crisp, clear, beautiful images in auto mode. But, it also allows you an incredible amount of control and versatiltiy with the preset modes and the manual modes. You can get great results with "art-ier" shots that encorporate depth of field, saturation, etc.

I've had great luck shooting in an indoor setting with natural light coming through the windows and lots of flourescent light coming from overhead when I've adjusting the white-point accordingly. It performs well in low-light situations too. I like the programmable function button that gives you a short-cut to the screen that pertains most to the situation you are shooting.

The portability, image quality, add-on lenses, shoe for a speedlight flash, price, and proven Nikon quality, make this a great choice for someone looking for the most versatile small digital camera they can get.

I bought and returned this camera.

If I returned it, then why did I give it a respectable 4 rating? Because in many (most) situations, it takes very nice pictures, it is small and stylish, it has full manual controls, it has a hotshoe for an external flash, it can accept different lenses, and it takes SD cards.

Why did I return it? Because it has one fatal flaw. Despite being billed as the flagship point & shoot camera for Nikon, and despite the many cutting edge features, and despite the great qualities noted above, the auto focus is VERY SLOW. It makes this camera almost unuseable if your subjects are moving kids, which is why I bought the camera. I lost at least 1/2 the shots that I tried to take of my kids because I couldn't get them focussed. If you read the various photography forums, there are several workarounds that help somewhat, but at the end of the day, the AF is still slow.

If you don't plan on taking candid shots of your kids, then this could be a great camera for you. I took several hundred wonderful pictures before I returned it. Just not of my kids.

By the way, I ended up buying a Fuji F31FD. I won't go into great detail about the pros and cons of this camera (and it has both), but I'll just say I kept it and I like it. The AF is much faster, and it has the added bonus of being one of the best (if not the best) low light cameras on the market today.

First things first. I am a semi-professional photographer. I own a Nikon D70 and many Nikon lenses and flash units. I also own a CoolPix 775. 2 of them actually. I am not a Nikon-hater by nature ...

... but, about the P5000:

Horrendous noise at every ISO. Yes, every ISO. Look at sample shots on photography review sites. Even at ISO 64, the noise is visible from across the room. Worse noise than my CoolPix 775 which I bought over 6 years ago. As bad as my $50 camera phone, sometimes worse. Unbelievably bad. I can not believe Nikon would release a camera with such a worthless, noisy sensor.

Painfully slow auto-focus. Slower than my CoolPix 775. Slow at wider angles, exponentially worse when zoomed in a bit.

Painfully slow recycle time between shots (even with no flash and a professional, high speed SD card). As bad as my CoolPix 775. I would think Nikon would have improved this sometime over the past 6 years. Guess not.

Terrible JPG compression. 10+ MP images that come out as 2 MB JPG's on "Fine" mode? Are you kidding? If they were compressed at an acceptable level, they should be 3 times that size. My 6 MP D70 images are larger files than the 10 MP images from the P5000. That tells you just how compressed the P5000 photos are. (And given how cheap memory cards are now, why is this extreme level of compression even necessary? Why doesn't Nikon let you save the images without compression or with mimimal compression?) It's bad enough that Nikon, like the other camera makers, stuffs 10 MP on a ridiculously tiny sensor just to trick people into thinking that a greater number of megapixels means better photos (the opposite is true actually, unless the sensor is large enough to accommodate the higher megapixel count, like in a professional DSLR), but to then compress those 10 MP of data into a 2 MB JPG is a joke. You end up lossing a huge percentage of the information those 10 megapixels collected (poorly) in the first place. Simply put, you wind up with 10 megapixels of garbage that's unsuitable for printing or posting on the web.

The autofocus assist light is blinding to people and animals alike. It's like a laser pointer. So much for discreetly taking candid photos if there's not enough light for the autofocus to work. And, sadly, unless you photographing the sun itself, there's not enough light for the autofocus to work. So forget about turning it off.

The camera is useless for indoor shots, candid people/animal shots, low light shots, and shots of anything that moves even slightly. Unless you plan on photographing architecture on Mercury (or you're blind), DO NOT buy this camera.

Just don't do it.