Nikon COOLPIX P500 12.1 CMOS Digital Camera with 36x NIKKOR Wide-Angle Optical Zoom Lens and Full HD 1080p Video (Black)

About me. Photography was a serious hobby back in the film days. I had the usual SLRs plus one I had modified for close up work on large format film. I also have an interest in technical illustrations. With digital I went through three low end point and shoots holding off until there was a digital that could do more than I had done with film cameras. This is that camera -- and just as I got used to no viewfinder I have one again.I first tried to focus this review as between low and high end point and shoots. But low end does not mean fewer features as it did in the film days. Today's low end was yesterday's high end. I found a theme that I think works. This camera takes even old, expected features and expands their limits while perfecting them. At the same time it includes features which simplify doing what the experts do.That said, I am enthusiastic about this camera. The single disappointment is it does not stitch the interval photos into a time lapse movie clip. But I can do that with free software on my computer so it is not a serious disappointment.I have tried a little bit to keep my perverse sense of humor under control. I did not completely succeed.On with the review.===The price is not for one gimmick like the zoom range which is what gets your first attention. Every feature is state of the art. If you want to save $100 you will take a hit in several areas. Sure you really can survive with a lesser zoom range but that camera will have other lesser features such as 720p max instead of 1080p. This is a well-engineered camera. You don't take a hit on one feature to get another. It does not have one great feature on an otherwise mediocre camera. If you are considering buying you can stop trying to find the "gotchas." There are none.Yes it does have a point and shoot size sensor. The size and cost of the lens is a function of the sensor size. The larger the sensor the more the camera will cost for the same lens features. The good news is the sensor is CMOS instead of CCD. This gives the same performance in lower light so the lower f-stop of the lens is less of a handicap. Related to this the low f-stop is related to the zoom range for the same price range.Guys! It comes in the same shade of red as that sports car you are going to buy some day. Don't dismiss it as girlie.In the auto mode it is an idiot proof point and shoot. You don't have to read the fine manual. Turn it on, pop up the flash and press the shutter button. Wife, son, daughter, relative or in-law can take a picture of you with no instructions whatsoever. No more family outings with dozens of pictures of everyone but you. You do not have to carry a simple point and shoot in addition to this camera.And by idiot proof I mean myself. When in doubt get at least one image in the auto mode before playing around. It is likely to be near the best shot you can get. Trust the camera. The software has all the technical knowledge as well photographic judgement included.Technical because snow scenes really are bluish as the snow reflects the blue sky so that it technically correct. Photographic judgement because our eyes adjust to snow when out in it and do not see the blue. But it shows up in prints where it shows the real scene not what we saw. So the snow mode takes out the blue. In fireworks we "see" lots of after images that really are not there so the camera makes exposure compensations to produce the image we saw not what was actually there at the time of the exposure. Trust the camera. It knows the tricks of the trade.Yes that 36x zoom got your attention. You might have missed the 1cm, 4/10", close up macro while thinking about taking pictures of the moon. It means a close-up of a quarter won't fit on a monitor. So you get a low power microscope thrown into the deal. If you can get insects to hold still more power to you. Flowers can't fly away.Those pictures of a huge rising full moon are done by taking a picture of it at full zoom so it appears much larger compared to objects on the horizon. Do not try this with the sun unless you can comfortably look at it without sunglasses. It can destroy the sensor. You can also do these with interval timing to show the rise and set of the sun. When you can do what the pro's do you have bragging rights.The 22.5mm with no zoom is wide enough to take a group photo in a small room and gives a good chunk of the landscape without using the panorama mode. The zoom range allows you to take pictures at any distance with subject filling the frame. A zoom lens to do this with a DSLR will cost several times more than this camera if you can find one. Generally you will need several lenses and a 2nd mortgage to pay for them.Yes it is large and weighs a pound. Weight is good because there is less vibration. Size is good because five finger, two-handed grip means less vibration. Besides that the vibration reduction schemes work quite well. Nothing will substitute for a good tripod or for resting against something solid even your own chest with the extended LCD. Nothing will substitute for a steady mount in low light. This is state of the art engineering not magic.Putting stabilization and higher zoom levels together means you can get pictures of action without having to get close enough to disturb the action. The kids have discovered a new bug or something. You can get pictures of it without getting so close that you get "Daddy, look what we found" changing the scene you wanted.The other side of the coin is you can be part of the fun using the auto mode without having to think about the camera. Click the flower icon and get a picture of what the kids found so interesting -- maybe it isn't something dead. (And if it is dead you can hide the image from the review menu so mother doesn't see it.) No fumbling with settings and menus. No "hold still while I get the camera ready" or "You're blocking the light." The camera will take care of you.Want to have a little fun? Put it in smart portrait mode and point it at a TV and watch it finding the faces. This also gives a feel for how it identifies faces so you can learn how focus will work when shooting people. BTW: This takes processing which means it is a battery drain. If other modes do similar amounts of processing this explains why the battery does not last as long as people seem to expect.Why care? The batteries are cheap enough. I got a charger and three spares for about $10. I have not made note of conditions such as flash/no flash but I haven't gotten less than 120 shots per charge and as high as 250. Outside the camera they take about a hour to recharge. I'm not complaining about battery life in the least. While your at it a spare SD card never hurts. An extra $25 in functional extras for a $400 camera is peanuts.An 8GB card is over a thousand images at the largest size and highest quality. Unless you want to carry around the family photo album that is big enough for most uses. 8GB is also around five fully charged batteries worth of pictures. If you are not going to carry the spare batteries there is no point to a larger card.If you do not want to read the manual just put it in auto and forget it. You can figure out what all the commonly used settings do just by pushing the buttons.The manual on disk is concise. It does cover every feature but you have to read carefully. Each subsection is telling you something. There is a high dynamic range (HDR) mode buried in the camera. One line will tell you the 1cm close up is only at the third step of the zoom. It is all there.Every feature is covered with a short explanation of what it does. It is enough to try it and see for yourself. Yes, each section could be longer but it is not an education in photography.If you want to learn digital photography there are books devoted to that. Here is a secret those publishers do not want you to know. 90% of what the books are telling you is the same for both film and digital. What you can find in a used book store is most of what you need and with luck for 10% of the price. If you don't mind doing your own research you can google up all you need to know for free.And if you have had digital cameras before everything you learned on the low end cameras translates to this camera. The basic buttons are even in the same place and do the same things. What more can you ask?===Yes, autofocus is slow in low lighting conditions. Autofocus works by maximizing contrast. In low light there is little contrast. The red LED is trying to brighten the image enough produce contrast. There are limits to what technology can do. That is why there is manual focus -- use it. Keep in mind if it were not for the capabilities of this camera you would likely not be trying some of these low light pictures. Something is better than nothing.Which leads to what this camera is beyond point and shoot. It lets you get beyond the point and shoot when the scene modes are not good enough or simply do not get what you want. Sure we can talk about being artistic but are we really artists? Will the next Ansel Adams please raise his hand? We are looking for the best picture or for something interesting that cannot be easily added by computer software such as Gimp dot org -- which google as it is free.Lets go back a few decades when automated exposure was the latest must have feature in cameras. Before that it was all manual. After the automatic exposure fad wore off the companies introduced aperture and shutter priority modes. Progress and then lets get back to the good old days. So this camera has the four modes one expects cameras to have as options in addition to the full auto, idiot proof mode. But even in these modes the camera tries to warn you if try to do something the software says should not work but it doesn't stop you from trying.So what has changed? Auto not only sets the proper exposure. It tries to pick the right scene mode. You can choose the scene mode manually or you can trust the camera. Most of the time it is going to work as well as you picking the scene. There are so many scene modes to choose from I doubt anyone can pretend to have tried them all. Here in Tampa, Florida snow scenes are out. For the scenes I have tried there is no quality difference between my choice and auto. They are different but best is a matter of taste.But you do want to try several options. A night portrait in muted incandescent porch light is different from a camp fire which is not a candle. Now think of a night portrait of a subject with a camp fire in the background. There is only so much the software can do. Better than adequate pictures are found in a batch of adequate pictures. Take LOTS of pictures. The camera has features like exposure bracketing to do this all at once instead of asking your subject to hold still for minutes at a time and changing the mood of a very enjoyable evening.When professional photographers say takes lots of pictures they are not just pushing the shutter a lot of times. They are changing things for each picture. One of the things they are doing is exposure bracketing. There is an automatic feature to do that. The camera has other multiple exposure features to do the other things the professionals try.I can't think of a reason for a five hour limitation for interval shooting, aka time lapse. That said, five hours will cover most events such as opening flowers. And there is no reason not put push the shutter again for another five hours worth of images. It is not a deal-breaker. It is an added feature. Unless I have missed a menu option some place this does not stitch them together into a video clip. You will need other software for that. There are image sizes compatible with video aspect ratios.True there is no way to attach filters to the lens. These days there isn't much use for them save to protect the lens as image processing software can do all the effects and dozens more. The only reason left is to protect the lens. This is a glass lens. It is not easy to scratch. I do not worry about it. I have used cameras regularly for over 40 years and have never scratched a lens. If I were to worry about something it would be dust in the zoom mechanism, flour in the kitchen being in the category of dust. That is just a guess. I have no idea if that would be a problem. Given this is from Nikon I doubt it.===Despite another review, the camera I have does in fact have zoom in one power steps. It isn't smooth but it isn't big jumps either. And yes it is a bit slow but if it were faster it would be harder to adjust. It takes a bit of practice to get fine control of the zoom. If it were faster fine adjustment would be harder. Until there is a multi-speed zoom, you can't have it both ways.A faster zoom would also be a noisier zoom and people love to zoom while making movies. They either do not like the noise of the zoom or complain the sound goes off while zooming. One wishes people would notice how rarely zoom is used by Hollywood. It is rarely used because it rarely works for a scene. Don't do it.Making movies is a different set of skills than stills. It is better to splice a long and a close shot than to zoom in. It has more dramatic effect. Zooms that do work are so fast they might as well be splices.Remember you are not making a movie. For movies you are supposed to splice scenes together, change their order, delete scenes. Unless you are doing post production editing you are not making a movie, you are recording an event, warts and all. The bride might want to have the entire ceremony start to finish to relive it at some indeterminate future date. No one else ever wants to see in its entirety not even, or perhaps especially not, the groom.Keep in mind this is a fancy still camera with movie capability included. If you want to make serious movies you need to get a video camera as much above a Flip® as this is above a simple point and shoot. Videos need much greater stabilization than stills. Tripods are a necessity. When the camera moves a steady cam mount is needed. Never compare your results with those of Hollywood.Be gentle with yourself.Your standard for comparison is your neighbor's videos not what you see on TV. Do not expect miracles from the audio. Cardioid mikes pointing forward do not fit in this form factor. Professionals do not have microphones on the cameras. That is for amateur movie makers working alone. The closest professional comparison is your local evening news with $6000 and up video cameras.Keep in mind it is an added feature just as many video cameras throw in taking stills as a feature. You would not buy a movie camera for its quality stills nor vice versa.All that said, the videos aren't half bad at all. 1080p, the best HDTV standard, is as good as you have to get and it gives you the smaller formats down to old style TV, 640x480. The file size/recording time specs suggest the finest recording level is about the quality that is used for movies on DVD. It is still going to be video quality not film converted to video. It is more than good enough for family events.If you grew up on and have bad memories of home movies in Super 8, this is a whole new world. If you don't want to lug around a video camera on the off chance of a couple minutes use this will work. If you go back to the good old days of DAT tape this is still a whole new world.Above all, do not forget you can take videos. Use it for any kind of action. You may trash it later but it might be pure gold. You never know what people are going to do when they are having fun. The button is placed conveniently where you don't have to think to start recording.I find it surprising that people will take dozens of pictures of their kids at action events like little league or soccer and not have one video clip. There is software that will let you pull stills out of a movie clip. Far from the best but more than good enough for the internet.A word of advice. Do not try video of action at extreme zoom. You can't follow the action like the highly paid professionals for major league games. They practice more hours every day than you spend at a game once a week. And the networks have more than one cameramen trying to get the same action. It is not uncommon for all three cameramen to fail to get a close up. If you succeed, congratulations. If you fail, don't kick yourself, practice -- a lot.

I must confess that I am not a professional photographer, nor a serious hobbyist. I just enjoy taking photos. I still use film camera, which I had long preferred and had used regularly until now. I like the convenience of being able to choose and pick photos from a digital camera, but I still think that real photographers use real film cameras. Digital photos can be manipulated; film photos are the result of a good photographer.My first digital camera was a basic no media card that cost $20.00. I next moved up to a 3.5mp camera, which was sufficient for a number of years.For awhile I had wanted to get a bigger and more powerful digital camera that had more options. I was thinking about getting a DSLR, but didn't want to spend so much money. I've been reading reviews about this line of cameras. Nikon Coolpix 500 received a number of positive reviews with a reasonable price. After considerable research, I decided on this camera and I must say that I am pleased with the purchase.It is easy to operate, almost idiot friendly, in fact, and has many options like smart portrait, night landscape, and manual. I love the telephoto lens that allows me to get close up shots of birds at my feeders or in the trees. The camera makes great use of ambient light, which look even better when I use the flash. Sunset photos with telephoto, flash and night landscape are vibrant.I like the fact that when you forget to take off the camera cap, the camera reminds you to shut if off and remove the cap. Also, the cap can't be put back on into place unless the camera is off. I'm still getting used to and finding my way around the camera, but all in all, I'm quite happy with it.In the box with it comes a hard copy of the Quick Start Guide, which is all you really need, two CD's that contain a User's Guide, editing and photo software, cord for use as USB cord or with the AC plug. It also comes with a battery, strap and camera cap. It is energy savings and shuts off after a few minutes of non-use.It is better than a basic point and shoot, but not a DSLR. Overall, it is a nice compromise.