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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 22 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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10 out of 10 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"a flawed but still a fine camera with a lot of capability."
Pros: extensive feature set, huge zoom range, generally very good to excellent image quality, operational flexibility
Cons: very noisy above ISO 200, no RAW file format, somewhat sluggish performance
Summary: I think the expert review on this web site is actually fairly accurate and well-balanced, and frankly better than most of the other expert reviews on this camera. A lot of people coming from digital SLR's have posted reviews on the Web that criticize this camera because of its relative lack of speed and somewhat noisy images, but it is a little bit ridiculous to compare any of the so-called ultra zooms to any digital SLR on those points. Admittedly, the camera could be faster, and I have disabled ISO above 200 because it is frankly virtually unusable. It bugs me that they don't allow you the in-camera editing features on full-size images, which seems to defeat the whole purpose of being able to do red-eye correction, image cropping and other editing tools within the camera itself.
On the other hand, the cameras feature set is so intuitive that I was able to access virtually every feature without consulting the manual. People need to remember that ultra zooms as a class are always going to have some fairly significant intrinsic trade-offs between absolute image quality and flexibility of being able to go from wide-angle and fairly extreme zoom ranges without having the inconvenience of switching lenses and without the enormous bulk of a digital SLR and two (very expensive!) large lens kits. I do think Nikon probably should have done a better job making the camera a bit more responsive, as it just takes too long sometimes to get a shot off. And I'm completely baffled as to why they included editing features that you can't use most of the time. however I have to say that the images that I have gotten so far have been consistently good to excellent including some very fine macro images, an area where Nikon has always excelled. If you keep some of these trade-offs in mind, and you're not looking for digital SLR levels of performance and low noise at higher ISO speeds, this camera will not to be a disappointment (snooty reviews on the Web to the contrary). It packs a lot in a very small container, and frankly gives you a lot for your money.
Where to buy
Nikon Coolpix P80:
$399.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$399.95 | Yes |
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