Nikon Coolpix P900

 

Nikon turned a few heads when it announced the Coolpix P900 ($599.95), a large superzoom with an unfathomable 83x lens. It can capture wide angle scenes and zoom far—very, very far—to capture distant objects. It’s a great idea for a camera, and one that works fairly well, but it’s not without a couple of issues. There’s some pretty aggressive noise reduction going on with its 16-megapixel images, which limits the detail the lens can muster at moderate ISOs, and the camera is unresponsive during burst shooting. If you value zoom above all else, and take care to keep the ISO settings low, the P900 is a solid choice. But our favorite superzoom is still the Canon PowerShot SX60 HS.

Design and Features
Most superzooms are big, but the P900 is exceptionally large. At 4.1 by 5.5 by 5.5 inches (HWD) and 2 pounds, it’s larger and heavier than some SLRs with a kit lens attached. But a kit lens isn’t going to give you the same type of reach as the P900. The closest superzoom in terms of range in this class, the 65x Canon SX60HS, is slightly smaller (3.6 by 4.5 by 5 inches), and noticeably lighter (1.4 pounds).

A lot of the weight is in the lens, which is a marvel. The 1/2.3-inch image sensor, the same size used in most superzooms and entry-level compact cameras, makes it possible. In full-frame terms, the lens covers a 24mm field of view at its widest setting, and zooms all the way to 2,000mm—longer than any SLR lens currently in production. The image above shows the lens at its widest. Below is the view when zoomed all the way in; it shows a close-up of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is barely visible on the horizon of the wide shot.

At its widest angle the aperture is f/2.8, but it narrows to f/6.5 when zoomed all the way in. Despite having such a long range, it doesn’t cover the widest angle in this class. The Panasonic FZ70 uses a 60x lens that covers a 20-1,200mm field of view.

It can be difficult to lock onto a subject when zooming so far in. Thankfully Nikon incorporates a Framing Assist button into the P900’s design. It sits on the left side of the lens barrel and holding it will zoom the lens out, while showing an outline that represents how far you were zoomed in. Releasing the button returns the lens to its previous position. There’s also a zoom rocker on the barrel; it can be reprogrammed to act as a manual focus control, which is useful if you’re using the P900 to shoot the night sky or lock onto other objects that can be troublesome for autofocus systems.

Additional controls are located on the top and rear. There’s a big pop-up flash with a mechanical release, but no hot shoe for an external flash or trigger. To the right of the flash you’ll find the standard mode dial (standard PASM, scene modes, and effects modes are available), the zoom rocker and shutter release, a programmable Fn button, and a control dial. The Fn button adjusts the drive mode by default, but it can be changed to adjust a number of other settings, including the ISO, white balance, focus area, and metering pattern. The control dial adjusts the aperture or shutter speed when shooting in the respective modes, and sets the shutter speed when the camera is set to full manual operation.

Rear controls include a toggle switch to change between the LCD and the EVF (there’s also an eye sensor for automatic switching), a Disp button to toggle the amount of information that you see when shooting or reviewing images, and a dedicated Record button for movies. These are all across the top of the rear face, with the Record button running into a textured thumb grip.

Additional buttons include Wi-Fi, playback, menu, and delete controls. There’s a second control wheel on the rear—it doesn’t change any settings directly in most modes, but it does adjust aperture in Manual. It’s a shame that neither it nor the top control wheel can be configured for direct control of EV compensation. To adjust that you’ll need to press the right direction on the wheel and then set it from an on-screen menu. Confusingly enough, turning either the top or rear wheel clockwise dials in negative EV, which is counterintuitive. The other directional presses allow you to toggle Macro shooting, set the self-timer, and adjust the flash output; the rear wheel has a center OK button that’s used to confirm choices in menus. Annoyingly, the self-timer automatically turns itself off after a single shot.

Images can be framed via the rear 3-inch LCD or an eye-level EVF. The LCD features a crisp 921k-dot resolution and is mounted on a hinge that swings out from the body to face up, down, or all the way forward. It can also be closed against the rear, which will protect the LCD during transport. The LCD is definitely a step up from the Panasonic FZ70, which includes some more advanced photographic features like Raw support, but cuts corners on its build quality to hit a lower price point.

The built-in EVF is typical for this class in terms of size, 0.2-inch when measured diagonally. It didn’t seem as crisp to me as the SX60’s viewfinder, even though they are both specced at a 921k-dot resolution. But it’s adequate for framing shots, and it’s always easier to keep the camera steady when holding it to your eye as opposed to holding it out in front of you as you tend to do when using the rear LCD to frame up a shot. There is an eye sensor, which is a rare convenience in this class. You’ll need to move up to a premium superzoom like the Panasonic FZ1000 or the Sony RX10 to get a significantly better EVF; both of those cameras have shorter zoom ratios, but use a much larger 1-inch image sensor.

Both GPS and Wi-Fi are built into the P900. The GPS records your location data, and can also be used to set the camera clock. It locks on quickly, in about 20 seconds under a suburban New Jersey sky, and records locations accurately. I did notice that my clock was an hour slow when I used the GPS to set it, despite having told the camera that DST was in effect for my time zone.

Wi-Fi makes it possible to copy images and videos over to an iOS or Android device using the free Nikon WMU app. It’s a pretty straightforward interface. The P900 broadcasts its own network when Wi-Fi is activated, and you simply need to connect to it via your phone or tablet. NFC is also an option for pairing with compatible devices. By default there’s no Wi-Fi password required, but you can set one if you desire a sense of security. You can flag images for transfer on the camera and they’ll automatically copy over when the connection is made and the app is launched. Or you can simply browse the contents of the memory card via your phone’s screen.

There’s also a remote control function built into the app, but it’s very, very basic. Its shows a Live View feed with very little lag, which is a good thing. But in terms of control, you can only adjust the zoom and fire the shutter. Other remote apps support advanced features like tap-to-focus and give you access to manual shooting controls, but not here. Nikon has some work to do in this department.

Performance and Conclusions
Nikon has addressed some of the performance issues that plague its P600, but there’s still some work to be done. First, the good news. The P900 starts and captures an in-focus image in about 1.6 seconds when the lens is set to the 24mm position at startup. (You can also set it to zoom to 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 105mm, or 135mm when powering on). Focus speed is also solid; the P900 locks and fires in about 0.1-second at its widest angle and in 0.4-second when zoomed all the way in. If the P900 needs to hunt for focus when zoomed it can slow to 1.3-second, but that didn’t happen often in lab and field testing. The P600, which is still in Nikon’s lineup, requires 2 seconds to start, 0.2-second to lock focus at its widest angle, and about 1.7 seconds to do so when zoomed all the way in. It also missed focus several times during field testing; the P900 locked focus accurately with consistency.

But there’s still room for improvement when it comes to burst shooting. The P900 can fire off a 7-shot burst in about a second, but becomes unresponsive for about 5.3 seconds after that as images are committed to memory. Still, that’s a much better result than the P600, which required 30 seconds to recover after a 7-shot burst. If you opt to shoot at its slower 2.3fps burst rate you can shoot 59 pictures before the P900 slows down, but it becomes unresponsive as those are written to memory. I had to wait 14.5 seconds to shoot another photo, and about 3.5 minutes for all 59 shots to clear the buffer to a SanDisk 95MBps memory card.

See How We Test Digital Cameras

I used Imatest to check the sharpness of the camera’s lens. We’re not able to test its full range in our test lab—it’s just not possible to back far away enough from the test chart to do so. But at wider angles I was happy with the performance. At the wide end the lens scores 2,328 lines per picture height on a center-weighted sharpness test, which is better than the 1,800 lines we look for in a photo. Image quality is fairly consistent through the frame, but the edges are quite muddy (971 lines)—that’s pretty typical for the wide end of cameras of this type. Zooming to the 105mm position improves the overall score (3,263 lines) and edges top 2,400 lines. There’s a drop in clarity at 200mm, but the camera still scores 3,052 lines there with even performance across the frame.

That’s where the limits of our testing studio set in. I did some additional tests in the field, photographing birds at great distances. The practicality of getting working at a narrow aperture and using a shutter speed that I knew would net crisp results proved to be an issue here. At full zoom and ISO 110 (just above the base ISO 100 sensitivity), an image I shot of a cedar waxwing in a tree shows very little texture in the features of the bird or the bark of the tree when viewed at full resolution. When viewed at screen resolution the image looks good, but if you’re looking to make large prints of wildlife, sports, or other shots that require a long zoom, you’ll be a bit disappointed. The camera shows much better detail at low ISOs when not zoomed to such an extreme, so we can only surmise that the lens, as ambitious as it is, loses some fidelity when pushed to its limit. This particular shot also showed a little bit of color fringing, but I didn’t see much evidence of that in my other test images. The image above is a pixel-level crop.

I also used Imatest to check photos for noise, which can add unwanted grain to images and detract from detail as the ISO increases. The camera manages to keep noise under 1.5 percent through its top ISO 6400 setting, which raises a red flag when you consider its sensor size and resolution. Indeed, Nikon nets these scores via some very heavy-handed noise reduction. At ISO 100 and 200, images are crisp and show excellent detail, but at ISO 400 we see some smudging of fine lines, and it’s more noticeable at ISO 800. ISO 1600 is about as far as I recommend pushing the camera, and only when you really need to, as lines are as blurred as Alan Thicke’s son would have you believe at that point. You should skip using ISO 3200 and 6400 if at all possible.

There’s a good chance that the P900 will move to a higher ISO when its lens is zoomed, simply to ensure that you get an image that’s free of motion blur. As good as its image stabilization system is—and it’s quite good—you’ll still want to push the shutter to 1/125-second or 1/250-second when working handheld at maximum zoom. (And you’ll need to use a shorter shutter speed if you want to freeze motion of a fast-moving subject.) Raw shooting support, which is omitted here, could go a long way to make this a more versatile camera. Raw photos don’t have noise reduction applied, and as we’ve seen in other superzooms that support the feature—including the Canon SX60, the Panasonic FZ70, and the Fujifilm S1—shooting in Raw does net crisper images when shooting at a high sensitivity.

The P900 records video at up to 1080p60 quality in QuickTime format. For the most part, I found the details to be quite crisp, though there is some definite jitter to the footage when working on a tripod with image stabilization enabled. But the stabilization system does an excellent job of steadying handheld video, even at high zoom, with just a slight evidence of the jitter that’s pronounced when working on a tripod. Focus is quick and silent, and the lens can zoom in or out without adding noise to the soundtrack. Overall, it’s pretty solid video for a compact camera. There isn’t any sort of mic input, so you’ll have to live with the audio from the integrated stereo mic, but there is a micro HDMI port so you can connect the P900 to a TV to view images and video on a big screen.

The P900 also has a standard micro USB port. It’s used to charge the battery—you’ll need to do so in-camera unless you invest in a $50 external charger. A USB cable and an AC adapter are included. The memory card slot is placed in the same bottom compartment that houses the removable battery and supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards.

The Coolpix P900 has its strengths, but also a few weaknesses. On the plus side, its 2,000mm telephoto reach exceeds every other camera out there by a significant margin, and its autofocus system is a huge improvement when compared with the disappointing P600. In-camera Wi-Fi and GPS make it an appealing, albeit heavy, camera for travel, and the eye-level EVF is on par with others in this class. But there’s a definite drop in crispness when zoomed all the way in, even when shooting at a low ISO, and there’s an interval of unresponsiveness after shooting a long burst of images in continuous drive mode. I would have liked to have seen a bit more customizability in terms of control—the EV comp interface is backward in my mind, and one of the two dials should be able to control that function directly—and obviously Raw shooting support is sorely missed by this photographer. If you’re in the market for a travel zoom, there’s a good chance that your needs will be met by the Canon PowerShot SX60 HS, which is a better camera and maintains its Editors’ Choice status. But if you want the longest zoom on the market, the P900 is it—just be prepared to carry a heavy camera around and understand that its images aren’t as sharp when zoomed all the way in as they are at wider angles.