Writeup on Nikon 1 J1: New Nikon Mirroless Digital cameras
The Nikon 1 J1 is a stylish compact system camera using a 10-megapixel “CX” format sensor and the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Boasting continuous shooting speeds of up to 60 fps at full resolution, Full HD video capture, an ultra-fast hybrid auto-focus system, Smart Photo Selector and also a unique Motion Snapshot Mode, the portable Nikon J1 also provides more conventional shooting modes like Programmed Auto, Aperture and Shutter Priority, and also Metered Manual. Also aboard is a built-in pop-up flash using a guide variety of 5, a 3 inch rear display plus an electronic shutter. Charging $649.95 / 549.99 having a 10-30mm standard zoom lens, $699.95 / 599.99 using a 10mm pancake lens, or $799.95 / 699.99 in the double-lens kit while using 10-30mm and 30-110mm zoom lenses, the Nikon 1 J1 is scheduled to take sale later this month.
The Nikon 1 J1 is mostly made from aluminium with magnesium alloy reinforced parts and is therefore heavier than what you know already according to its size alone, coming in at 234g to the body only. What’s more, it feels better made than the official product shots would have you believe. Having an essentially grip-less design, the Nikon J1 is extremely much a two-handed affair that needs you to hold the camera’s weight in the left-hand, clutching the lens, and rehearse your right hand for balance and operating the controls. This is a very important thing since it forces you to pay attention to holding you properly, which experts claim goes far towards avoiding shake-induced blur inside your photos.
The camera’s clean, minimalist front plate is covered with the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. As an alternative to as a scaled-down version of the ancient F mount, it’s actually a completely new design that delivers 100% electronic communication involving the attached lens and the camera body, due to twelve contacts. Similar to around the manufacturer’s F-mount SLR cameras, there is a white dot for simple lens alignment, although it has moved from the 2 o’clock position (when viewed front on) to the top level in the mount. The lenses themselves use a short silver ridge around the lens barrel, which needs to be in alignment with said dot to ensure you to definitely be capable of attach the lens to the camera. Even if this may require some becoming accustomed to, it actually makes changing lenses quicker and much easier.
Without having lens attached, you will notice the sensor sitting right behind the plane with the bayonet mount. Just like the mount itself, the sensor is new. Measuring 13.2×8.8mm this “CX” format imaging chip has double the amount surface of the biggest imagers found in compact and bridge cameras such as the Fujifilm X10 and S100FS, but only about 50 % the spot of any standard Four Thirds sensor. In linear terms, a Four Thirds chip features a 1.36x longer diagonal than the Nikon CX imager. Provided that Four Thirds has a 2x focal length multiplier, the CX “crop factor” calculates to about 2.72, and therefore a 10mm lens has approximately the identical angle of view being a 27.2mm lens by using an FX or 35mm film camera. The Nikon 1 Nikkor 10-30mm standard zoom is thus similar to a 27.2-81.6mm (or, practically speaking, 28-80mm) FX lens in terms of its angle-of-view range.
The remainder of the Nikon J1’s faceplate is virtually empty, featuring merely the lens release, a receiver for the optional ML-L3 infrared handy remote control, two narrow slits to the microphone either sides of the lens, as well as an AF assist/self-timer lamp. There’s no grip by any means around the front of the Nikon 1 J1.
The two main ways of powering on the Nikon J1. You may use the on/off button sitting next to the shutter release or, for those who have a collapsible-barrel contact attached, just press the unlocking button on the lens barrel and turn the zoom ring to unlock the lens, an action that produces the digital camera to interchange on automatically. It is really an ingenious solution as you have to unlock the lens for shooting anyway. Start-up takes about a second - not even attempt to write home about yet still decent and entirely adequate.
You are able to frame your shots while using rear screen - there’s no electronic viewfinder as around the V1 model, a vital difference between the 2. The LCD screen is really a three-inch, 460,000-dot display that features wide viewing angles, great definition and accurate colours but only so-so visibility in strong daylight. We missed the EVF when using the J1 alongside the V1, in bright sunlit conditions or with the 30-110mm telezoom lens as holding the camera up to eye-level helped to stabilise the lens and avoid trembling camera.
The control layout is quite peculiar. The Nikon 1 J1 has a small, rear-mounted mode dial that lacks many of the shooting modes which might be usually seen on similar dials - particularly P, A, S and M - though it has enough room to accommodate them. These modes can be found about the J1 nevertheless, you need to dive into the rather long-winded and not entirely logical menu to seek out them. The J1’s mode dial just has four settings, Photo, Video, Motion Snapshot and Smart Photo Selector. The four-way controller has four functions mapped onto its Up, Right, Down and Left buttons; including AE/AF-Lock, exposure compensation, flash mode and self-timer, respectively. Of course this isn’t a bad selection of functions, the fact that there’s no ISO button will doubtlessly cause a great deal of photographers interested in acquiring the Nikon J1 to become unhappy.
There is a button on the rear labelled “F” but alas, it is not a programmable function button. In Photo mode, it means that you can quickly choose from the continuous shooting modes, when it’s in Video mode it enables you to toggle between regular and slow-motion recording. There are two more valuable controls on the back from the camera, together with a scroll wheel throughout the four-way pad and a rocker switch marked which has a loupe icon. The scroll wheel is employed to create the shutter speed in Manual and Shutter Priority modes (once you’ve found them inside the menu, that’s), as you move the rocker switch controls the aperture. Precisely why it’s got a loupe icon beside it’s that it control is utilized to zoom in by using an image to test for critical focus in Playback mode. Lastly, you’ll find four small buttons around the navigation pad, flush against the rear panel in the camera, including Display Mode, Playback, Menu and Delete.
So what are the ones shooting modes for the mode dial all about? The Photo or Still Image mode, marked having a green camera icon, is where you should be most of the time. Together with the mode dial set for this position, you are able to pick your desired exposure mode on the menu. The Nikon J1’s Scene Auto Selector is a brilliant auto mode in which the camera analyses the scene in front of its lens and picks just what it thinks may be the right way of that specific scene. It’s also possible to make a choice from the conventional PASM modes, which offer you full menu access and also the capacity to manually set the aperture, shutter speed, or both (Program AE Shift comes in P mode). ISO and white balance will also be manually selected, but only from your menu, as mentioned previously.
Of course there’s AWB and auto ISO as well, while using latter to arrive three flavours (Auto 100-400, 100-800 or 100-3200) helping you to specify how high you desire you to search in the event the light gets low. Also you can pick from three AF Area modes, including Auto Area, in which the camera takes power over just what it focusses on (this isn’t an incredible mode to possess when your default as being the camera obviously can’t read the mind and might consentrate on something more important than your actual subject); Single Point, the place you can make one among 135 AF points by first hitting OK after which moving the active AF point around the frame with all the four-way pad; and Subject Tracking, in places you pick your subject, press OK and enable you to monitor that subject since it moves around, as long as it doesn’t leave the frame needless to say.
The Nikon 1 J1 has a intriguing hybrid auto-focus system that mixes contrast- and phase-difference detection similarly since the Fujifilm F300EXR did. This gives the Nikon 1 J1 to concentrate extremely quickly in good light, even over a moving subject. The organization claims the Nikon 1 system cameras will be the fastest-focusing machines on the planet, and this also matches our experience - given that there’s enough light. When light levels drop, the digital camera switches to contrast-detect AF which, though faster than you are on most cameras, isn’t nearly you wish another method. It’s always the digital camera that decides which AF approach to use - an individual doesn’t have a affect on this.
Normally, the J1 will usually only turn to contrast detection when light levels are low. In good light, we were able to take sharp photos of fast-moving subjects. The Nikon J1 certainly won’t disappoint here. Manual focusing is usually possible, even though the Nikon 1 lenses don’t have focus rings. If you wish to focus manually, you first need to hit the AF button, choose MF, press OK after which utilize the scroll wheel to adjust focus. To work with you with this, the Nikon J1 magnifies the central part of the image and displays a rudimentary focus scale down the right side from the frame - but those will be the only focusing helps you get. There isn’t any peaking function available as on some rival models.
The J1 posseses an electronic shutter (the V1 has a mechanical shutter). It’s totally silent (the target confirmation beep is usually disabled from your menu) and allows using shutter speeds as quickly as 1/16,000th of a second and, with all the Electronic Hi setting selected, enables you to shoot full-resolution stills at 60 frames per second. Note however that although it is a major achievement, it’s restricted to a buffer that will only hold 12 raw files. Additionally, the use of this mode precludes AF tracking - you have to lower the frame rate to 10fps if you’d like that -, and the viewfinder goes blank whilst the pictures are now being taken. One application we are able to visualize where shooting full-resolution stills at 60fps could really be useful is AE bracketing for HDR imaging. With this rate, a few 5 bracketed shots may be consumed under 0.1 second, rendering small movements which could otherwise pose alignment problems - like leaves being blown within the wind - a non-issue. Alas, the Nikon J1 does not offer this sort of feature - in reality it doesn’t offer autoexposure bracketing at all.
Moving on to the recording mode, the Nikon 1 J1 has some pleasant surprises here. Most notably, the digital camera can be set to shoot Full HD footage, and also you even get to select 1080p @ 30fps or 1080i @ 60fps, according to whether you’d like to assist progressive or interlaced video. Unless you need Full HD, additionally, there is 720p @ 60fps, which is really smooth and still counts as hi-d. Secondly, you get full manual treating exposure in video mode. This is an option; you don’t need to shoot in M mode nevertheless, you can in the event that’s what you require. Thirdly, you get fast, continuous AF in video mode, and delay well, specially in good light. Movies are compressed while using the H.264 codec and stored as MOV files. You’ll find separate shutter release buttons for stills and video, and due to this - plus the massive processing power in the Nikon J1 - you can take multiple full-resolution stills even when recording HD video. This works the opposite way round too - it is possible to capture a motion picture clip even when the mode dial is within the Still Image position, simply by pressing the red movie shutter release. We’ve learned that in this case your camera will record the video at 720p/60fps.
In addition to being efficient at shooting regular movies in HD quality, the Nikon 1 J1 also can shoot video at 400fps for slow-motion playback. The resolution is less plus the aspect ratio can be an ultra-widescreen 2.67:1, nevertheless the quality is adequate for YouTube, Vimeo and so on. These videos are played back at 30fps, which can be over 13x slower than the capture speed of 400fps, permitting you to get creative and show the world an array of interesting phenomena which happen too quickly to look at in real time. The Nikon J1 goes a step forward by offering a 1200fps video mode, but the resolution and overall quality is too poor for that to become genuinely useful.
The 3rd icon about the mode dial is short for Smart Photo Selector. This feature allows you to capture a minimum of 20 photos for a single press from the shutter release, including some that had been taken before fully depressing the button. The camera analyses the individual pictures inside the series and discards 15 ones, keeping exactly the five so it thinks would be best regarding sharpness and composition. This feature is usually genuinely useful when photographing fast action and fleeting moments.
Finally, there’s a so-called Motion Snapshot mode where the camera records a brief high-definition movie - whose buffering starts at the half-press with the shutter release, so again includes events that have happened prior to button was fully depressed - and as well requires a still photograph. The movie plus the still image are held in separate files though the camera can combine them in a single slow-motion clip with background music. It’s fun but we can not really envision people making use of this shooting mode frequently. (In the event you observe the video with a computer, it is going to play back at normal speed, without sound, and this mode is really only interesting if you look at the clip in-camera or hook the digital camera around an HDTV by using an HDMI cable.)
The Nikon J1 stores photos and videos on SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, and props up fastest UHS-I speed class. Your camera runs on a reduced EN-EL20 battery to the V1 our government, and is consequently able to produce much less shots on a single charge, managing around 230, although it helps for making you body smaller. The camera’s tripod socket is made from metal and is particularly situated line with the lens’ optical axis. This also shows that changing batteries or cards isn’t likely while the J1 is attached to a tripod, because the hinges on the battery/card compartment door are so close to the tripod mount.
So, how did we like while using Nikon 1 J1? On one side, we liked it a lot. In good light, its auto-focus system is indeed faster than essentially anything we’ve used until now, the ability to track and lock target a variety of truly fast-moving subjects, and yielding plenty of sharp images in situations where our keeper rates have never been very good. Additionally, its high-speed continuous shooting modes have allowed us to capture interesting moments that we’d have surely missed if we had used a slower camera. The built-in pop-up flash proved more useful what has modest guide number might suggest, with the clever design minimising red-eye.
In contrast, the Nikon J1 has its own share of frustrating idiosyncrasies beginning with the person interface that forces you to dive in to the menu to access functions as basic as exposure mode, ISO speeds and white balance. While Nikon obviously cannot add extra buttons to your finished product, they could no less than have the “F” button customisable by using a firmware update. Also, nevertheless there is an avid button for exposure compensation - that is a advantage - I did not are able to activate a live histogram, community . could have made exposure compensation a lot more useful and to use. Again, this will likely to end up fixed in firmware.
We also missed the V1’s smooth, high-resolution electronic viewfinder, especially in bright light or while using the telephoto lens which does not lend itself well to being held out at arms length. The J1 only has a glass dust shield because it is defense against unwanted debris, rather than the more proactive sensor cleaning unit the V1 offers, and also the smaller battery shows that you will have to buy a supplementary anyone to get to the day’s heavy shooting. Having less an accessory port ensures that almost no Nikon 1 accessories are appropriate for the J1, for example the external flash and GPS unit.
Another thing we would not like was that the camera would always show the photo just taken for a few seconds onscreen, so we did not be capable of turn this instant postview function completely off (even if you can at any rate cancel it with a half-press with the shutter release). Finally, whilst the camera is normally fast and responsive, the camera takes much too long to get up from sleep mode in the event it is idle for some time, causing many missed shots.
That being said, the Nikon 1 J1 is usually a small and compact, high-performance system camera that like its larger are able to use several tweaks to the graphical user interface to raised suit the requirements serious amateurs. The intended target market of casual users will require to it for the sheer speed, built-in flash, lightweight along with the fun features it includes. We will now discover how the Nikon 1 J1 fared within the image quality department.