Nikon Coolpix 5000 review (digital camera)

In keeping with the Coolpix 5000's compact body design, Nikon put a 3X Nikkor zoom lens on it, giving the camera a more limited zoom range than its 5-megapixel peers. The lens is also relatively slow--with a maximum aperture of f -2.8 at wide angle and f -4.8 at telephoto--and there's no continuous manual focus. We were impressed with the five continuous shooting modes, but we wish that one would automatically refocus for each frame.

On a more positive note, the included rechargeable lithium-ion battery had a long life, and the camera turned in a respectably fast performance. Without prefocusing and with the flash activated, the shutter delay was about 1.7 seconds, and the shot-to-shot time for high-quality JPEGs came to a little more than 5 seconds. Of course, you'll need to multiply that figure by about five if you're shooting TIFFs. Image playback is quick, though, and you can scroll through several screens of camera parameter information for each frame.

Best uncompressed
We were very happy but not overjoyed with the test images we shot. Our pictures were well exposed and showed ample detail. The color balance tended to be warm, and JPEG images shot under indoor lighting of various types often had a strong yellow cast. Reducing the color saturation or using the manual white balance helped us get a more natural look, but what really solved the problem was switching to uncompressed TIFFs. Much of the yellow cast was due to JPEG compression artifacts, so we strongly recommend using the TIFF mode for portraits. In general, we saw a leap in quality when we recorded our pictures uncompressed, which made us wish the Coolpix 5000 could save RAW files in addition to TIFFs--they're faster to record and take up much less memory. We were disappointed to see as much chromatic aberration as we did. Having enough resolution to output large prints is great, but you'll think twice about making one if your backlit subject has a purple fringe 6 pixels deep. We also noticed more clipping than we'd like in the highlights, which caused detail in bright areas to be lost. On the other hand, we loved the camera's excellent macro mode, which can bring you as close as 2 centimeters from your subject.