Nikon P7000 Notes

The p7000 is almost the perfect high end compact camera:

• raw support
• excellent zoom range (better than the G12 and LX5)
• nice ergonomics
• decent low-light performance
• great image quality
• easily accessible manual controls

I was aware of these three issues when I bought it:

• slow shot-to-shot speed
• poor low-light focus
• no dedicated ISO dial
• 28mm, f2.8 on the short end is ok, but not as good as the Panasonic LX3 or LX5

The first two were apparently fixed in the 1.1 Firmware release and the last two I can live with.

It felt decent in the store. Slow but not intolerable. When I took it out on the first shoot, it suddenly seemed incredibly slow, taking 5-6 seconds after a shot to finish writing and become available for the next shot.

I did some more research and found other people were running 5-6 pause times:

• Camera speed tests after 1.1 firmware update
• Discussion on update improvements

So I played around with the settings and the main one you want to avoid is the zoom in preview. It basically zooms 1:1 on a small part of the picture to show you how sharp it was/wasn’t. This feature seems to add 2-3 seconds to the write time. Turn it off unless you have a lot of patience.

The setting you want to avoid is in Settings… Monitor Settings… Image Review… “Zoom in on active focus point“. Turning image review off completely shaved off another half second or second. Using a faster SD card also helps a bit. With a class 10 card and regular image preview my write times are somewhere around 2-2.5 seconds, which is acceptable for a compact.

Other random links:

• Flickr thread on interesting after market products for the p7000
• Retro faux-leather cases on eBay for the p7000

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