Nikon COOLPIX P510 Digital Camera (Red)

Versatile Excellence

The basic design of the Nikon Coolpix P-510 is a little heftier than most point and shoots with a grip on the right hand side and a lens barrel that extends a zoom from ...Read complete review

The basic design of the Nikon Coolpix P-510 is a little heftier than most point and shoots with a grip on the right hand side and a lens barrel that extends a zoom from wide angle to telephoto. It is roughly 4.6 inches from the front of the lens cap to the back of the eyepiece and 3.0 x 4.5 inches on the back. With 16.1 mp and a 42x zoom the Nikon has a macro mode and video mode.

A must option for me is the viewfinder. It's not that I like to squint, but I hate the glare of sunlight on point-and-shoot monitors. Holding the camera near your face also helps steady it in low shutter speeds or telephoto. It is more like a tiny monitor that changes lighting and focus as the camera does than a viewfinder. I was not happy with viewfinder on the Coolpix P-510 until I figured out you can focus it with a small dial to the left of the eyepiece. It also has a monitor with a double hinge for angled viewing or looking down like the old 4x4 cameras. A button to the left of the eyepiece toggles the image between the monitor and viewfinder.
The Coolpix P-510 shoots HD movies and does 3-D photos along with other features like panorama, multiple shot blending for backlit subjects as well as multiple shot best pick and rapid fire sports shots. With auto focus the camera selects up to 9 subjects in a frame to focus on, it also has face recognition and even a smile recognition setting. You can set the timer to get into the picture, and use GPS tagging to put your picture on Google Earth or add a voice memo. The GPS might also be useful for business or real estate purposes or those long treks where you forget which picture goes with which mountain. With complexity comes lack of simplicity, although P-510 has been reviewed as easy to use compared to others, another reason I bought it since I hate learning curves.

The first test I did straight out of the box was my living room, available light. It was night and there were only three lights on, kitchen, bedroom and one behind me. All lights were compact florescent none were rated more than 60w. The wide angle picture showed a well lit room including stains on the carpet, the TV a bit too bright. The next picture was taken with the telephoto of a mirror about 23 feet from where I was sitting, don't ask why. When it clicked, I was surprised to see a ghost image and realized it had focused on the surface of the mirror and fingerprints of my grand-daughter not normally visible! I shot the available light on auto, which can be set to adjust i.s.o. sensitivity either from 100 to 400 or from 100 to 800. For particularly dark night shots or very fast shutter speeds, single i.s.o. settings of 1600, 3200 or Hi-1, the equivalent 6400 can be locked in. These settings might work for hand held shots in a pinch. Warning: taking pictures in bars may cause damage to the camera if you shoot of the wrong guy with the wrong woman, just saying.

I tried an outdoor test at some typical Ohio woods and fields. It was windy and mostly cloudy, not the best conditions, but good for a test. I tried quite a few macros with lots of blur, but a few came out including the two thistle shots and the Rattlesnake Master. The wind caused movement of the plants and constant refocusing on the macro. Macro is hard enough no wind since you have shallow depth of field but the steady-hand software helped some on the movement. I got about one out of five shots in macro.

To get an idea of the telephoto power I shot a treetop at roughly 200 feet. The wind was blowing the leaves sideways, and I didn't even see the pods hanging from the sycamore until I pulled the picture up on the computer. It was pretty impressive for a cloudy day near sunset with wind. I did lean up against a tree as a tripod. The final picture was a back-lit cloud shot. The clouds were breaking up revealing blue sky. The wide angle auto-levels came out close to perfect.

The cd version of the instruction manual is lengthy and very useful. It has an index for quick cross-referencing. After actually reading instructions, I found the switch to macro-focus was easily used with better results. The typical Rotary Selector to the right of the monitor has a flower icon at the bottom. Pressing there allows you to select Auto-focus, Macro, Manual Focus (MF) or Infinity (mountain icon). Little green squares show up around objects in focus when the shoot button is pressed half-way. Although I like using the SLR-like viewfinder, tilting the monitor on the back allows an easier view of a macro subject while lining up the camera. For macro there is a feature that takes a burst several of shots and melds them all together to get better lighting or depth of field. This feature is called Noise Reduction Burst which shows up as NR on the screen when the macro (flower icon) is selected. It is activated by holding the shoot button down like the trigger of an automatic weapon.

Similar bursts can be taken in museum mode (available light) and backlight mode. If I had used the Museum mode in my living room picture, the camera would have taken two or more pictures with the correct lighting for the TV and for other and other points of the scene, and merged them together so the TV would not have washed out. I visited a museum but neglected to use that setting which resulted in similar washouts, although close-up pictures of amethyst and aragonite crystals behind glass turned out well without flash. Other ambient light uses might be weddings, school activities or music events. Remember when you use a flash in an auditorium it usually just illuminates the back of the heads in front of you.

Macro focus shots taken outside of thistle silk and other autumn fluff show individual strands quite clearly. Likewise a shot of a cluster of backlit blackberry leaves which creates a 64 x 48 inch picture at 72 MP and 3.1 MB can be cropped at around 7x 9 inches to show veins at almost a cellular level and hairs on the edge of the leaf. Note this picture was at moderate resolution which produces wide angle shots as large as 13.1 mp. The resolution can be adjusted downward if you need to take a lot of shots or have less than an 8 GB SD card (optional).

A Mode Dial on the upper right of the camera like traditional Nikons allows you to manually set either S for shutter speed or A for aperture, but on P-510 also allows shot or scene modes. Besides auto-focus, there are three main modes shown: Night, Landscape and Backlight. An option called Scenes allows entry into a part of the menu containing some 16 other scene modes including fireworks, pet portraits, party, foods, museum, snow, as well as some of the above mentioned options, all of which are chosen after tapping the menu button on the lower right of the monitor next to the delete button.

Another choice on the Mode Dial is P for programmed settings where you can select Image Size and Quality, White Balance, Metering, bracketing, noise-reduction, face softener for portraits and i.s.o. adjustment, among others. It also offers several continuous shooting modes including Time Lapse at 30 second intervals, one, five and ten minute intervals. Still another mode option on the dial is Effects which leads to a number of choices including Paint, Sepia, Silhouettes, High Key (bright) and Low Key (dark), and others, again choices found after pressing Menu.

A Manual M setting on the Mode Dial allows you to set both aperture from f-3 to f-8.4 using the Multi Selector (circle around the OK button) and shutter speeds using the Command Dial from 8 seconds to 1/2500th of a second. The focus can still be shown in the green squares or eyeballed on Manual Focus (MF) by pressing the top of the Multi Selector to focus far away or the bottom to focus closer.

The final setting on the Mode Dial is U for User Settings. This selection allows storage of favorite combinations of settings to be reused in similar situations.

There are three other icons besides the Macro (flower) at bottom of the Multi Selector. On top is the flash symbol which allows Red-eye Detection, Fill Flash, Slow Sync, which lowers the shutter speed for night shots, and Rear Curtain Sync which creates a tracer effect behind moving objects. To the right of the dial is a short cut to Exposure Compensation (i.s.o.) selection which includes a histogram, and to the left is a Self-timer selection, which allows 10 seconds to get into a group shot or two seconds to let go of the camera on a tripod without shaking it. Yet another option is Smile Detection which allows the camera to fire when it sees a smile.

There are two zoom controls, one on the right in front of the shoot button and one on the left of the lens barrel. The power of the zoom is the equivalent of 24mm focal length to 1000mm focal length in non-digital glass which equals 41.667 times. An optical zoom increases it a little higher at a small expense to quality, but that can also be done by cropping. The startup zoom setting can be reset, and I found it useful to set it at 55mm which would be the normal lens on a SLR camera. It is a good point of reference. The telephoto offers great reach-out-and-touch-you shots at zoos, ballgames or concerts.

In-camera editing can be done to pictures using features such as Quick Retouch, D-lighting, Skin Softening and Crop. You can also zoom into the picture using telephoto to see what to crop, or add effects like fisheye or make an email copy if you can't wait to get back to the computer screen and Photoshop.

The HD video works well in low light close ups, as I found shooting around my office with only a 75w desk lamp and a computer monitor for light. Outside I found long telephoto shots crisp and colorful, but at long range a tripod or monopod is necessary unless you have the stealth of a Zen sniper. The steady-hand software can only do so much. A slight hissing sound is recorded from the zoom but not noticeable if there is other sound. Macro focus can also be used for HD close-ups of bugs or flowers.

HD creates really big files and chews up the memory. The default is the highest HD at 1920x1080, which can record on the 90MB internal memory for 25 seconds or a 4GB card for 25 minutes. There are two other settings of HD, the lowest at 1280x720 able to record an hour with 4GB but only 29minutes per take. The iFrame 540 at 950x540 can record 25 minutes on 4GB of memory for internet use. Another setting VGA at 640x480 can record 2 hours and 50 minutes in 29 minute takes with a 4GB card.

The video button is for just above the upper right corner of the monitor. Pushing it once allows access to the camera menu via the menu button. Pushing twice starts the video and the third time stops it. There is probably less chance of taking video of your feet by having it separate from the photo shoot button, but I did have some confusion of where to push the zoom button since my finger was not all ready on the photo shoot, but maybe that's why there is a second zoom switch on the left hand side.

There are several drawbacks to the P-510: the lithium battery has to be charged while in the camera using an adapter that came with the camera, although you can order a stand alone charger extra. The P-510 comes with around 90 MB of internal memory which could save 18 pictures at 5 MB each. I did buy an extra battery and an 8GB card. If you intend to shoot HD movies you may also need to upgrade to a faster computer unless you intend to run them into your TV from the camera with the AV hook-up provided.

I almost scratched the lens of the P-510 while getting a macro shot of some quartz crystals. I accidentally touched the left zoom button and the lens extended. I have not been able to find a 50 mm lens filter to protect the lens, although there may be a retro-fit available.

Although the reputation of Nikon cameras have for rugged durability outdoors is on par with the reputation for the clarity of their photography, it remains to be seen if the hardened plastic can stand up to what nature throws at it. A waterproof case would be a useful option for an adventure photographer. My previous digital camera lost use of the pop-up flash probably because of dust or moisture from a cave. My SLR before that was actually lost in a cave flood. Slips happen. As far as cave photography, missing on the P-510 is the option to leave the shutter open to fire multiple unattached flashes. The eight second shutter speed would have to do the job.

If I had one option to add to the P-510, it would be a wildlife detector, maybe something that detects motion and zooms in with maximum shutter speed with multiple shots. The Nikon P510 is an excellent choice for backpackers, adventure photographers and sports fans and music fans as well as family chroniclers. It is about as pro as you can get without using the heavy artillery of an SLR with long lenses.

LCS

Versatile Excellence

The basic design of the Nikon Coolpix P-510 is a little heftier than most point and shoots with a grip on the right hand side and a lens barrel that extends a zoom from ...Read complete review

The basic design of the Nikon Coolpix P-510 is a little heftier than most point and shoots with a grip on the right hand side and a lens barrel that extends a zoom from wide angle to telephoto. It is roughly 4.6 inches from the front of the lens cap to the back of the eyepiece and 3.0 x 4.5 inches on the back. With 16.1 mp and a 42x zoom the Nikon has a macro mode and video mode.

A must option for me is the viewfinder. It's not that I like to squint, but I hate the glare of sunlight on point-and-shoot monitors. Holding the camera near your face also helps steady it in low shutter speeds or telephoto. It is more like a tiny monitor that changes lighting and focus as the camera does than a viewfinder. I was not happy with viewfinder on the Coolpix P-510 until I figured out you can focus it with a small dial to the left of the eyepiece. It also has a monitor with a double hinge for angled viewing or looking down like the old 4x4 cameras. A button to the left of the eyepiece toggles the image between the monitor and viewfinder.
The Coolpix P-510 shoots HD movies and does 3-D photos along with other features like panorama, multiple shot blending for backlit subjects as well as multiple shot best pick and rapid fire sports shots. With auto focus the camera selects up to 9 subjects in a frame to focus on, it also has face recognition and even a smile recognition setting. You can set the timer to get into the picture, and use GPS tagging to put your picture on Google Earth or add a voice memo. The GPS might also be useful for business or real estate purposes or those long treks where you forget which picture goes with which mountain. With complexity comes lack of simplicity, although P-510 has been reviewed as easy to use compared to others, another reason I bought it since I hate learning curves.

The first test I did straight out of the box was my living room, available light. It was night and there were only three lights on, kitchen, bedroom and one behind me. All lights were compact florescent none were rated more than 60w. The wide angle picture showed a well lit room including stains on the carpet, the TV a bit too bright. The next picture was taken with the telephoto of a mirror about 23 feet from where I was sitting, don't ask why. When it clicked, I was surprised to see a ghost image and realized it had focused on the surface of the mirror and fingerprints of my grand-daughter not normally visible! I shot the available light on auto, which can be set to adjust i.s.o. sensitivity either from 100 to 400 or from 100 to 800. For particularly dark night shots or very fast shutter speeds, single i.s.o. settings of 1600, 3200 or Hi-1, the equivalent 6400 can be locked in. These settings might work for hand held shots in a pinch. Warning: taking pictures in bars may cause damage to the camera if you shoot of the wrong guy with the wrong woman, just saying.

I tried an outdoor test at some typical Ohio woods and fields. It was windy and mostly cloudy, not the best conditions, but good for a test. I tried quite a few macros with lots of blur, but a few came out including the two thistle shots and the Rattlesnake Master. The wind caused movement of the plants and constant refocusing on the macro. Macro is hard enough no wind since you have shallow depth of field but the steady-hand software helped some on the movement. I got about one out of five shots in macro.

To get an idea of the telephoto power I shot a treetop at roughly 200 feet. The wind was blowing the leaves sideways, and I didn't even see the pods hanging from the sycamore until I pulled the picture up on the computer. It was pretty impressive for a cloudy day near sunset with wind. I did lean up against a tree as a tripod. The final picture was a back-lit cloud shot. The clouds were breaking up revealing blue sky. The wide angle auto-levels came out close to perfect.

The cd version of the instruction manual is lengthy and very useful. It has an index for quick cross-referencing. After actually reading instructions, I found the switch to macro-focus was easily used with better results. The typical Rotary Selector to the right of the monitor has a flower icon at the bottom. Pressing there allows you to select Auto-focus, Macro, Manual Focus (MF) or Infinity (mountain icon). Little green squares show up around objects in focus when the shoot button is pressed half-way. Although I like using the SLR-like viewfinder, tilting the monitor on the back allows an easier view of a macro subject while lining up the camera. For macro there is a feature that takes a burst several of shots and melds them all together to get better lighting or depth of field. This feature is called Noise Reduction Burst which shows up as NR on the screen when the macro (flower icon) is selected. It is activated by holding the shoot button down like the trigger of an automatic weapon.

Similar bursts can be taken in museum mode (available light) and backlight mode. If I had used the Museum mode in my living room picture, the camera would have taken two or more pictures with the correct lighting for the TV and for other and other points of the scene, and merged them together so the TV would not have washed out. I visited a museum but neglected to use that setting which resulted in similar washouts, although close-up pictures of amethyst and aragonite crystals behind glass turned out well without flash. Other ambient light uses might be weddings, school activities or music events. Remember when you use a flash in an auditorium it usually just illuminates the back of the heads in front of you.

Macro focus shots taken outside of thistle silk and other autumn fluff show individual strands quite clearly. Likewise a shot of a cluster of backlit blackberry leaves which creates a 64 x 48 inch picture at 72 MP and 3.1 MB can be cropped at around 7x 9 inches to show veins at almost a cellular level and hairs on the edge of the leaf. Note this picture was at moderate resolution which produces wide angle shots as large as 13.1 mp. The resolution can be adjusted downward if you need to take a lot of shots or have less than an 8 GB SD card (optional).

A Mode Dial on the upper right of the camera like traditional Nikons allows you to manually set either S for shutter speed or A for aperture, but on P-510 also allows shot or scene modes. Besides auto-focus, there are three main modes shown: Night, Landscape and Backlight. An option called Scenes allows entry into a part of the menu containing some 16 other scene modes including fireworks, pet portraits, party, foods, museum, snow, as well as some of the above mentioned options, all of which are chosen after tapping the menu button on the lower right of the monitor next to the delete button.

Another choice on the Mode Dial is P for programmed settings where you can select Image Size and Quality, White Balance, Metering, bracketing, noise-reduction, face softener for portraits and i.s.o. adjustment, among others. It also offers several continuous shooting modes including Time Lapse at 30 second intervals, one, five and ten minute intervals. Still another mode option on the dial is Effects which leads to a number of choices including Paint, Sepia, Silhouettes, High Key (bright) and Low Key (dark), and others, again choices found after pressing Menu.

A Manual M setting on the Mode Dial allows you to set both aperture from f-3 to f-8.4 using the Multi Selector (circle around the OK button) and shutter speeds using the Command Dial from 8 seconds to 1/2500th of a second. The focus can still be shown in the green squares or eyeballed on Manual Focus (MF) by pressing the top of the Multi Selector to focus far away or the bottom to focus closer.

The final setting on the Mode Dial is U for User Settings. This selection allows storage of favorite combinations of settings to be reused in similar situations.

There are three other icons besides the Macro (flower) at bottom of the Multi Selector. On top is the flash symbol which allows Red-eye Detection, Fill Flash, Slow Sync, which lowers the shutter speed for night shots, and Rear Curtain Sync which creates a tracer effect behind moving objects. To the right of the dial is a short cut to Exposure Compensation (i.s.o.) selection which includes a histogram, and to the left is a Self-timer selection, which allows 10 seconds to get into a group shot or two seconds to let go of the camera on a tripod without shaking it. Yet another option is Smile Detection which allows the camera to fire when it sees a smile.

There are two zoom controls, one on the right in front of the shoot button and one on the left of the lens barrel. The power of the zoom is the equivalent of 24mm focal length to 1000mm focal length in non-digital glass which equals 41.667 times. An optical zoom increases it a little higher at a small expense to quality, but that can also be done by cropping. The startup zoom setting can be reset, and I found it useful to set it at 55mm which would be the normal lens on a SLR camera. It is a good point of reference. The telephoto offers great reach-out-and-touch-you shots at zoos, ballgames or concerts.

In-camera editing can be done to pictures using features such as Quick Retouch, D-lighting, Skin Softening and Crop. You can also zoom into the picture using telephoto to see what to crop, or add effects like fisheye or make an email copy if you can't wait to get back to the computer screen and Photoshop.

The HD video works well in low light close ups, as I found shooting around my office with only a 75w desk lamp and a computer monitor for light. Outside I found long telephoto shots crisp and colorful, but at long range a tripod or monopod is necessary unless you have the stealth of a Zen sniper. The steady-hand software can only do so much. A slight hissing sound is recorded from the zoom but not noticeable if there is other sound. Macro focus can also be used for HD close-ups of bugs or flowers.

HD creates really big files and chews up the memory. The default is the highest HD at 1920x1080, which can record on the 90MB internal memory for 25 seconds or a 4GB card for 25 minutes. There are two other settings of HD, the lowest at 1280x720 able to record an hour with 4GB but only 29minutes per take. The iFrame 540 at 950x540 can record 25 minutes on 4GB of memory for internet use. Another setting VGA at 640x480 can record 2 hours and 50 minutes in 29 minute takes with a 4GB card.

The video button is for just above the upper right corner of the monitor. Pushing it once allows access to the camera menu via the menu button. Pushing twice starts the video and the third time stops it. There is probably less chance of taking video of your feet by having it separate from the photo shoot button, but I did have some confusion of where to push the zoom button since my finger was not all ready on the photo shoot, but maybe that's why there is a second zoom switch on the left hand side.

There are several drawbacks to the P-510: the lithium battery has to be charged while in the camera using an adapter that came with the camera, although you can order a stand alone charger extra. The P-510 comes with around 90 MB of internal memory which could save 18 pictures at 5 MB each. I did buy an extra battery and an 8GB card. If you intend to shoot HD movies you may also need to upgrade to a faster computer unless you intend to run them into your TV from the camera with the AV hook-up provided.

I almost scratched the lens of the P-510 while getting a macro shot of some quartz crystals. I accidentally touched the left zoom button and the lens extended. I have not been able to find a 50 mm lens filter to protect the lens, although there may be a retro-fit available.

Although the reputation of Nikon cameras have for rugged durability outdoors is on par with the reputation for the clarity of their photography, it remains to be seen if the hardened plastic can stand up to what nature throws at it. A waterproof case would be a useful option for an adventure photographer. My previous digital camera lost use of the pop-up flash probably because of dust or moisture from a cave. My SLR before that was actually lost in a cave flood. Slips happen. As far as cave photography, missing on the P-510 is the option to leave the shutter open to fire multiple unattached flashes. The eight second shutter speed would have to do the job.

If I had one option to add to the P-510, it would be a wildlife detector, maybe something that detects motion and zooms in with maximum shutter speed with multiple shots. The Nikon P510 is an excellent choice for backpackers, adventure photographers and sports fans and music fans as well as family chroniclers. It is about as pro as you can get without using the heavy artillery of an SLR with long lenses.

LCS