CNET Editor's rating: 7.1 out of 10
Reviewed by
Lori Grunin
Review date: 06/09/08
Release date: 04/14/08
The good: Optically stabilized, wide-angle, long zoom lens; comfortable shooting design; voice annotation; time-lapse mode.
The bad: Poor noise handling above ISO 200; no raw support; relatively slow performance.
The bottom line: One of the better 18x megazooms, nevertheless you should consider the Nikon Coolpix P80's sluggish performance before you commit to it.
For megazoom shooters, the Nikon Coolpix P80's 18x zoom, 27-486mm-equivalent f/2.8-4.5 lens likely sits at the top of the list of the P80's attractions. The range provides a good combination of wide-angle and telephoto views at relatively wide maximum aperture values. Nikon supports the lens with an agreeable and functional design. Weighing almost 14 ounces, the P80 is no feather, but that is common for this class. It's relatively compact, with a comfortable rubberized grip and thumb rest.
A mode dial makes it easy to get to select shooting modes--manual, aperture- and shutter-priority, Program, and scene exposure, as well as movie capture.
My one pet peeve, which I've mentioned with regard to other cameras, is having to access the setup menu from the dial. I always find myself hitting the menu button to make it go away, ineffectively, of course. If you only had to go into the menu once during the initial setup, it wouldn't be so annoying. However, that's where Format resides, and you have to format regularly.
The navigation switch is large, with a clear, tactile delineation between the inner OK button and the outer navigation controls. The body, though made of textured black plastic, doesn't feel particularly cheap or fragile.
Like its competitors, you summon most of the frequently used shooting controls via a dedicated button, including exposure compensation, focus modes (macro, infinity, and manual), self-timer, and flash (including red-eye reduction, fill, slow sync, and rear curtain sync). You can also navigate via the back dial, which also controls your shutter, aperture, and exposure-compensation adjustments in the various shooting modes. The display and LCD/EVF toggle buttons feel oddly small given the size of the camera, though.
Other controls you access from the shooting menu. Most notable are an array of ISO sensitivity options. In addition to complete Auto and manual 64 through 6,400 (ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400 are reduced resolution modes); it offers High ISO sensitivity Auto (64-1600) and Fixed-range auto, which lets you choose one of three ranges: ISO 64-100, 64-200 or 64-400. Given how aggressive the blurring gets at ISO 400, I suggest you stick with the 64-200 modes if you're going to use the automatic mode.
In addition to matrix, center-weighted, and spot metering, the P80 offers spot-AF area for use with the AF-area modes. The AF-area modes include face priority, auto, manual, and center. As usual with these technologies, I find the face-priority setting too inefficient, the auto makes undesirable choices, and the manual AF-point selection is only useful if you're shooting the same composition repeatedly. The center-focus-and-recompose approach, albeit old fashioned, is still the most efficient. Other shooting options include image size and quality, Optimize image (custom and preset settings for contrast, sharpening, and saturation), white balance, single or full-time AF, flash exposure compensation, noise reduction, and distortion control (which reduces frame size). Lack of support for raw files is a big hole in the feature set, though.
Unfortunately, the P80's performance is quite disappointing. Its 2.9 seconds to wake up and shoot isn't awful for a megazoom, but the 1.1 seconds it takes to focus and shoot in decent light is slow for any class; in low-contrast circumstances, its 1.4-second time is closer to average. The camera has a concomitantly high shot-to-shot time of 2.4 seconds, which seems to be fueled by slow memory writes. While the 2.8-second flash shot-to-shot performance may not be worst in class, it's still on the high side. Burst shooting, at a typical rate of 1.3 frames per second, also comes in near the bottom of its class. In practice, the slow performance means the subject can move or someone can walk into the frame of the photo before you get the shot. It's definitely not your best choice for shooting sports, children, or animals.
The P80's lens isn't bad. Barrel distortion is about what you'd expect at the widest angle of 27mm-equivalent, however, it exhibits visibly more pincushioning in the middle of the range (around 150mm-equivalent) than the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. Zooming doesn't feel smooth, it vibrates a little disconcertingly as you zoom through the range. However, it's responsive, given that it's stepped (as most are), and the optical image stabilizer works as well as we've seen from Nikon's other VR lenses.
The 2.7-inch LCD is pretty good, it has a wide viewing angle and doesn't wash out in direct sunlight. It's supplemented with an electronic viewfinder; both displays update fast enough so that they don't interfere with shooting, although the EVF only displays 97 percent of the scene, compared with 100 percent for the FZ18. While the battery didn't conk out too soon, its 250-shot-per-charge rating (CIPA standard) seems underpowered compared with the FZ18's 400 shots or the Canon PowerShot S5 IS's 450 shots (with AA nickel metal hydride batteries).
As frequently happens, I'm ambivalent about the photo-quality rating. The 10-megapixel P80's strongest point seems to be the saturated, more-frequently-than-not spot-on colors. Exposures tend to be quite good, though in bright sunlight it seems to produce more than its share of blown-out highlights. But even when printed, the photos had a slightly crunchy digital look that I didn't see in shots from other cameras--including the recent Coolpix S600 or older Coolpix P5000, as well as other megazooms such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H10. Furthermore, Nikon's aggressive noise suppression kicks in at ISO 400 and blurs most of the detail away; if you have a lot of detail in your scene, the photos are borderline at ISO 400 and unusable by ISO 800. So depending upon what you shoot, the P80's photos can range from great to just OK. For the image-quality rating, I split the difference. (See the slide show for image samples.)
For movie capture, the P80 also offers a neat time-lapse mode, though I wish you could choose shorter intervals than 30 seconds. There's also a 30fps VGA movie mode, which produces reasonably good AVI clips at a bitrate of about 1.1 megabytes per second, but it's pretty limited: no optical zoom or VR available while shooting.
Among the handful of 18x megazoom models--the Panasonic FZ18, old-ish Olympus SP-560UZ (we haven't yet gotten in the 20x SP-570 UZ) and the Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd--the Nikon Coolpix P80 ranks as one of the better ones. But if speed and solid high-ISO photo quality are really important to you, consider stepping up to a dSLR with configurable lenses.
Shooting speed (in frames per second) (Longer bars indicate better performance)
8 out of 10 - Excellent Excellent camera, Great image quality, Almost Perfect
I own a Nikon d40x, and D300 and this is an amazing back up camera. It takes as great shots ...
I own a Nikon d40x, and D300 and this is an amazing back up camera. It takes as great shots as my d40x does, sometimes haha. I would recommend this to anyone just starting out, if you it's your first camera or as a backup, you will not be disappointed at all. It takes amazingly clear shots and at 10MP you can blow up your shots poster size...it has a great video function, manual modes for up to 8" long exposures. The LCD is bright, clear and accurate. The long lens range and 18x zoom along with macro function lets you get some great shots you would not be able to with any other coolpix or canon SD series camera. This is an excellent camera, the only thing I wish it had was RAW, I love shooting in RAW, but that's just me. This would be a 10\10 if it had RAW and if you could expose for more than 8 seconds, but hey for 400$ its practically as nice as an 800$ d40x!!!! Buy this camera, you will not be let down.
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by resvelvet (see profile) -
May 8, 2008
9 out of 10 - Spectacular The best camera I have bought in years!!
I have had this camera for 2 days now, and I could be happier. It beats the Canon S3 IS ...
I have had this camera for 2 days now, and I could be happier. It beats the Canon S3 IS and S5 IS, the Olympus SP 560 and 570, and the Panasonic FZ18. I have done extensive research on all of these models, and tried them all at a store. I took a gamble and went with this new nikon model and i love the speed, picture quality, and the super fast zoom lens. The VR is extremely effective when i am taking pictures of my kids in their sports leagues. I can't put this camera down!!
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by kiddrule (see profile) -
May 1, 2008
8 out of 10 - Excellent a flawed but still a fine camera with a lot of capability.
I think the expert review on this web site is actually fairly accurate and well-balanced, and frankly better than most ...
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.
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by dfwatt (see profile) -
June 15, 2008
3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.
8 out of 10 - Excellent Light, high quality camera
Got the first one at Best Buy and after 2 weeks it started displaying white streaks on the vu-finder. Returned ...
Got the first one at Best Buy and after 2 weeks it started displaying white streaks on the vu-finder. Returned it and got a replacement from Best Buy, no questions asked. The replacement has worked great with no problems. They must have been working out the bugs in the first batch. The zoom is super fast. The sports action mode has some problems in bright light in that it makes over exposed streaks on the pictures, but in dim light it works well. Was able to take pictures of pitches crossing the plate in a local baseball game and actually see the ball in successive shots as it moved closer to the plate! I've had the Nikon 5700 and 8700 in the past, and like the features of the P80 better. Just wish they would have kept CF memory and the same battery as the 5700 and 8700 so I didn't need to buy new batteries, chargers and memory cards, sigh... I ended up getting extra batteries, chargers and memory on e-bay and PriceGrabber for good prices. Overall, an excellent camera, the sports action setting needs a little improvement in bright light situations.
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by Kenneth Zoellner (see profile) -
June 9, 2008
3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.
9 out of 10 - Spectacular This is a great camera
I finally upgraded my Olympus 4 mega pixel 10X zoom camera. I really like Olympus cameras and have purchased several ...
I finally upgraded my Olympus 4 mega pixel 10X zoom camera. I really like Olympus cameras and have purchased several lately for gifts (compact 6-7 mega pixels). So when it came time to upgrade my 10X zoom, I expected to get another Olympus. But after reading reviews and checking out the pros and cons, I opted for this Nikon P80 and am VERY satisfied. The "zoom factor" for a camera in this price range is far more than expected and the quality has been excellent. I haven't tried all the features yet, but so far, so great. I would highly recommend this camera.
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by elynngreen (see profile) -
May 28, 2008
3 out of 4 users found this user opinion helpful.
8 out of 10 - Excellent Great little camera!
I wanted a compact camera with super-telephoto and SLR features that I could always have with me. My D70 with ...
I wanted a compact camera with super-telephoto and SLR features that I could always have with me. My D70 with all its lenses and accessories isn't always practical. I wanted the ability to shoot video too. On the first day of use I shot a couple of portraits of two of my grandchildren that were just amazing. I have had the camera for about 2 weeks now and am fairly familiar with it. There are still a few features that I need some more practice with, but my favorite feature is the preprogrammed scene modes. If you are looking for a camera that will do most everything well, check this one out. I would highly recommend that you get an extra battery if you plan to do lots of shooting especially with the speedlight (flash.) It won't replace my D70, but since I will always have a quality camera with me I won't miss that shot either.
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by stoutdog (see profile) -
June 21, 2008
1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
4 out of 10 - Mediocre I wish I had read the review before I got one. I am truly disappointed with this Nikon.
The review of the Nikon P80 notes the digital noise, the slow processing, (even on the fastest read/write memory ...
The review of the Nikon P80 notes the digital noise, the slow processing, (even on the fastest read/write memory chip I have, I still found it to be slow,) etc. The most disappointing aspect of the camera is the washed out pictures--not only highlights, but entire well lit areas. I have fiddled with the menu to try to get better renditions, to some inprovement. It is ironic, I got the camera because of its manual, shutter and apperture priority features, but the best pics I have gotten were obtained using its point-and-shoot option. Truly disappointig!!
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by e-llustrator (see profile) -
June 11, 2008
1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.
4 out of 10 - Mediocre Nice photo quality with 18X zoom but...
One of the main reasons I bought this was the sports mode. But I have to return after using two ...
One of the main reasons I bought this was the sports mode. But I have to return after using two days. Whenever I dial to the sporst mode, I felt the continual shaking & dull sounds. It was not worth to keep over $399.
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by wowbillythekids (see profile) -
June 3, 2008
1 out of 2 users found this user opinion helpful.
2 out of 10 - Terrible rca opal sucks
My daughter received this item as a gift for her birthday at after once month it did not work any ...
My daughter received this item as a gift for her birthday at after once month it did not work any longer. I tried everything. I called the customer service line and they were no help at all. Just send it in with the receipt and we will see if we can fix it or replace it depending on if it is still covered by warranty. Hello what part of birthday present do they not understand. no receipts. Any way I would not suggest this item to any one.
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by moorebr (see profile) -
June 2, 2008
5 out of 10 - Average I would not buy this camera
I just bought a point and shoot for my grandson. After looking at a couple of cameras, the sales person ...
I just bought a point and shoot for my grandson. After looking at a couple of cameras, the sales person showed me this model. We discussed it and I had to agree that it was not as good as the other models I had looked at and the price was higher. So I opted for another Nikon camera. I have had no actual experience with this camera; I just did not like its features and price. I normally use a Nikon D200
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by georgehd (see profile) -
June 9, 2008
JPEG 1280 x 960,
JPEG 640 x 480,
JPEG 3264 x 2448,
JPEG 3584 x 2016,
JPEG 2592 x 1944,
JPEG 3648 x 2432,
JPEG 1024 x 768,
JPEG 2736 x 2736,
JPEG 1600 x 1200,
JPEG 2048 x 1536,
JPEG 3648 x 2736
Supported Flash Memory
MultiMediaCard,
SD Memory Card
Lens System
Type
Zoom lens - 4.7 mm - 84.2 mm - F/2.8-4.5
Focal Length
4.7 mm - 84.2 mm
Lens Construction
11 group(s) / 14 element(s)
Additional Features
Self Timer
Yes
Self Timer Delay
10 sec,
2 sec
Additional Features
Built-in speaker,
USB 2.0 compatibility,
Face detection,
DPOF support,
In-camera red-eye fix,
Audio recording,
PictBridge support,
Face-priority AF function
Camera Flash
Effective Flash Range
1.6 ft - 29 ft
Type
Pop-up flash
Flash Modes
Flash OFF mode,
Fill-in mode,
Slow synchro,
Auto mode,
Red-eye reduction
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