The Nikon P80 Ultra-zoom with 18x zoom!
And the more interesting one out of Nikon’s 3 new camera’s today, is the Nikon P80 ultra-zoom digital camera. And this camera’s claim to fame, is going to be its 18x zoom lens featuring a whopping 27mm-486mm coverage (in 35mm terms.) So that’s from decent wide-angle to a paparazzi worthy telephoto range.
The camera looks suspiciously like a Canon S5 IS to me though, and I wish Nikon would’ve been a bit more daring with this one. Although this is a big re-design for Nikon’s P series (P stands for ‘Performance’) of digital cameras as previous P series models weren’t ultra-zooms - there are quite a few ultra-zooms out in the market right now. We’ve got the aforementioned Canon S5 IS, the Fuji S8100fd, the Olympus SP-560 UZ, the Sony H50 and the Panasonic FZ-18.
I wish Nikon would’ve thrown in an articulating LCD, or had taken the lens wider. (I’m still waiting for an update to the Nikon 8400 from 2004!) But all in all, specs wise, the Nikon P80 looks all set to rumble with all the other ultra-zooms. But will it be a case of too little too late for Nikon in this market segment?
The Nikon P80:
10.1 Megapixels 18x zoom lens (27-486mm equivalence) (f/2.8 - f/4.5) Vibration Reduction (And with a lens like that, VR is going to help a lot) (Nikon’s Press Literature only says that the P80 comes equipped with Optical Vibration Reduction, and interestingly, DPreview’s news article claims it comes with CCD-Shift VR, not lens based) Full Manual Controls ISO 64-1600 (ISO 3200 and 6400 only at 3MP and smaller) Available this April with an MSRP of $399.95Hit the Read More Link to see the full Press Release.
NIKON “ZOOMS” IN ON PERFORMANCE WITH THE NEW COOLPIX...
