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08/08/2004 |
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Nikon CoolPix 5700 Digital Camera Don Bradbury gives his opinion of the latest Prosumer digicam from Nikon
The technology involved in digital photography continues to advance apace. At buying time, you have to decide on what specification you need and the price bracket you’re interested in. If the latter turns out to be about £800 discounted, then the new Nikon 5700 may well be on your shopping list, and with good justification; it gets rave reviews. Let’s see what we made out of it. With a 5megapixel CCD, offering resolutions up to
2560 x 1920, a large 8x zoom f2.8-4.2 lens taking you from 35-280mm
equivalent on 35mm in optical mode, a 1/4000th sec top
shutter speed (a benefit offset by having apertures available down
to only f8), multiple auto-focus and auto-metering modes, and all
the other controls you could reasonably ask for, the 5700 brings you
to salivating point before you’ve even opened the box. Macro mode And what about a 3cm macro mode, an integral 4 metre flashgun at ISO 100 (plus a hotshoe for alternative Nikon guns), quick taking and playback modes, with most common controls on buttons. You might think there’d be little to complain about on the spec side. True, macro mode is only available at certain settings of the zoom. Finding that feature might fox you at first; and you’d better get it right, too, as macro mode won’t engage if you undershoot the mid-point of the range by too much. There are both plus and minus points attached to this arrangement. Zooming the lens out narrows the taking angle, which you’ll probably value for macro work, but it also loses light gathering power by reducing the effective maximum aperture. Further, it means you have to spend time zooming out before engaging macro mode, otherwise the flashing yellow LED focus-find indicator will never change to ‘go-ahead’ green. It also increases the risk of camera shake, makes more difficult the framing of small objects while the camera is handheld, and reduces depth of field, minimal though the already is in macro mode. Still, 3cm macro is not to be sneezed at; you can get some stunning close-ups at that range.
In the default multi-point metering mode the 5700 takes pictures with nicely neutral colour balance, and decent detail. It did seem, though, that detail was somewhat lacking in any deep shadow areas, and highlights could lose some colour, too. Light blue skies were somewhat prone to washing out. Most options were on buttons for quick access. Unfortunately, that didn’t extend to light metering. Shame! Rummaging around in menus that were not all that intuitive to use would not suit the action photographer. However, multi-point metering coped admirably, and many will be happy to leave that set. There are user presets, we should add, that can quickly switch modes, but you still have to use the menus to change to one of them. Handling was excellent, helped by a popup and variable strength flash unit that, provided you didn’t have a stray finger on it at the time, self-activated from the camera’s body into its shooting position when the light level demanded it. Nice! Picture quality Picture sharpness was not quite as crisp as we’d anticipated, though a lens with no less than fourteen elements - as demanded by the large zoom range in particular - and despite the use of ED (extra low dispersion) glass technology in two of the elements, would play its part in that. There were no jaggies to be seen until huge magnifications were taken from JPEG fine mode shots, as you’d expect of a 5MP digicam. There were uncompressed and RAW (NEF) modes available, too. But in this reviewer’s view, there’s some way to go yet before digital camera technology routinely matches conventional film photography in terms of the contour sharpness of output when the best technologies from each field are compared. That’s not all down to the lens, of course; the CCD and electronics play their part in a digital camera, and the film and processing in conventional film photography. The battery The CoolPix 5700 is small and light (480gm). Other things being equal, that’s a good thing, but it does mean the battery is also quite diddy by comparison with others, and that means relatively frequent recharging, bearing in mind that the 5700 features not only an LCD (albeit only 1.5 inch) but an electronic viewfinder as well. The camera shuts down at around a quarter of full charge remaining, as indicated in the viewfinder. That is not a particularly good arrangement. No doubt it is to be sure that the camera can be switched on again immediately with sufficient power left in the battery to at least retract the lens. As ever, you get used to such idiosyncrasies, but the worst aspect was that quarter charge indication was quickly reached and then you were left wondering if the camera was about to go offline at any moment. All this is to say, the charge (or battery voltage) indicator is not really up to prosumer standard, or it wasn’t on the review sample at least – where batteries do tend to take a battering. Having said that, an IBM Microdrive was in use, and that device makes greater demands on the battery than flash memory. Electronic viewfinder The dioptre-adjust electronic viewfinder works quite well, though the image was not well magnified. There’s no doubt it enhances the view in low light, but the scene does then become quite grainy. In such conditions, finding focus becomes the problem; it can be rather slow with this contrast-find type. Part depression of the shutter button helps focussing, but the shutter fires easily with the 5700’s super-smooth action release; perhaps too easily. A simulated shutter sound can be switched on, and that helps to determine whether a shot has been taken or not, but you can wait many seconds for focus to be reached if you don’t part-depress the shutter release. With a zoom control that falls nicely to the thumb
(plus variable zooming speed), adjustable picture quality (hue,
contrast, sharpness etc), noise reduction on demand, manual focus if
required, a variable self-timer, ISO settings up to 800, that
flip-out, though rather diddy, LCD for multi-mode viewfinding, and
accessories that feature tele and wide angle converters, good
software that includes Nikon View 5 and Adobe Photoshop Elements,
all the leads you need, and Li-ion battery technology and recharger,
the package lacks but little. There’s no case, however. Flash The Nikon 5700 has a relatively powerful integral flashgun, and in the main it serves well. It can, however, sometimes overpower and burn-out light hues, such as flesh tones, in sunlight fill-in shots if you use it on full power. Most upmarket digicams we see these days cope rather well in fill-in mode, but the 5700 doesn’t always seem to quench the gun quite fast enough for a well balanced picture when used at full power. In conclusion All-told, the Nikon CoolPix 5700 digicam is worth consideration if £800 is your buying bracket. It handles well, in most circumstances has no trouble taking nice pictures with well graduated tones and faithfully reproducing subtle nuances of colour, and it imposes minimal distortion. It offers plenty of shooting options, too, and crucially, it accepts the IBM Microdrives as alternative to the 32MB of Compact Flash you get as standard. At the resolutions offered by this camera, the dedicated digital photographer may well need one; indeed many will reject from his shortlist a digicam that isn’t Microdrive-compatible these days. That’s an increasingly rare find as manufactures try to hook us all on Secure Digital memory cards. |
Metering
