{"id":17390,"date":"2012-02-14T10:10:04","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T17:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/?p=5881"},"modified":"2012-02-14T10:10:04","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T17:10:04","slug":"brief-impressions-of-the-nikon-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/14\/brief-impressions-of-the-nikon-v1\/","title":{"rendered":"Brief impressions of the Nikon V1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently returned from my Guatemala trip, on which I carried a Nikon V1 borrowed from the Photoshop team. \u00a0If you want a long &amp; crazy-detailed overview, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.robgalbraith.com\/bins\/multi_page.asp?cid=7-11666-11988\">Rob Galbraith&#8217;s review<\/a>. What follows is explicitly not that. Rather, it&#8217;s off-the-cuff impressions from a guy who normally carries a 5D and who didn&#8217;t have the new cam&#8217;s manual to consult.<\/p>\n<p>On the whole it&#8217;s a camera I quite like. \u00a0With a few improvements it could be one I love.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Highlights: Quality, silence, size.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I found image quality to be excellent. (Here&#8217;s a <a class=\"lightbox\"  title =\"Landscape-Unretouched\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/files\/2012\/02\/Landscape-Unretouched.jpg\">totally untouched shot<\/a> taken from a very bumpy van.) Granted, I was looking at reduced-res images on my iPad (making it harder to judge noise &amp; sharpness), and I was relying on Apple&#8217;s built-in raw conversion (making it harder to judge flexibility of dynamic range), but still I was quite pleased. Even photos taken in a dark museums &amp; caves came out well when using Auto ISO (a feature my 5D lacks) and the 10mm f\/2.8 lens.<\/li>\n<li>I loved the cam&#8217;s total silence. \u00a0People couldn&#8217;t tell that it was on or firing, making it great for <a class=\"lightbox\"  title =\"H-Candid\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/files\/2012\/02\/H-Candid1.jpg\">candid<\/a> <a class=\"lightbox\"  title =\"CornDrinx\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/files\/2012\/02\/CornDrinx.jpg\">shots<\/a>. At one point a colleague asked me, &#8220;Are you actually going to <em>take<\/em> any photos?,&#8221; as she didn&#8217;t realize I&#8217;d been snapping away.<\/li>\n<li>The presence of a dedicated video start\/stop button alongside the shutter release is a cool idea, making it easy to unambiguously capture video (i.e. no need to check or switch shooting mode first). \u00a0Overall video quality is great.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><p>Lowlights: Battery, lags.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I found battery life on the whole to be somewhere between mediocre and awful. \u00a0Even with the rear display turned off, I&#8217;d knock a fully charged battery down to 1 bar in maybe 150 shots. \u00a0Unlike an SLR, you can&#8217;t just leave the cam on &amp; ready to shoot at a moment&#8217;s notice. There&#8217;s no way to just leave it on (max setting is 10 min), meaning you can&#8217;t just raise the cam to your eye &amp; know it&#8217;ll be ready to go. Weirdly, I found that when left on, the body grew quite warm to the touch. Even with access to my recharger every night, I stressed about battery life; without it (e.g. if backpacking), I&#8217;d have had to carry at least one or two spares.<\/li>\n<li>When you raise the cam to your eye, there&#8217;s a very slight delay before the digital viewfinder comes to life&#8211;nothing outrageous, but annoying for street photography. \u00a0One can hack this by taping over the proximity sensor, but presumably that would just exacerbate the battery life issue.<\/li>\n<li>As noted in the Galbraith review, the camera insists on briefly showing the last-taken photo in the viewfinder. Again, it&#8217;s not horrible, but I often want to keep concentrating on what I&#8217;m shooting, not chimp at the shot I just took.<\/li>\n<li>Minor: I found it a bit too easy to turn the shooting mode wheel by accident. \u00a0Suddenly I&#8217;d find myself in some odd burst mode, having nudged the wheel with my right hand.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For\u00a0pop-up street photography, I found the Nikon 1 a good camera&#8211;just not quite a great one. Cutting out the lags, letting me leave it on, and adding a flip-out screen (so that I could compose &amp; fire from waist height) would make it nearly ideal for the kind of work I was doing. \u00a0As it was, I learned to work around the camera&#8217;s limitations, and I&#8217;m very happy with what it let me capture.<\/p>\n<p>A few galleries, in case you&#8217;re interested:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jnack\/sets\/72157629092353823\/show\/\">A trip to waterfalls &amp; caves<\/a> (many taken on the move or in the dark)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jnack\/sets\/72157629021201867\/show\/\">Street life parts one<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jnack\/sets\/72157628990724203\/show\/\">two<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jnack\/sets\/72157629006890797\/show\/\">Cemetery &amp; vultures<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Of all these, I think <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/jnack\/6758485215\/sizes\/l\/in\/set-72157629021201867\/\">this is my favorite<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently returned from my Guatemala trip, on which I carried a Nikon V1 borrowed from the Photoshop team. \u00a0If you want a long &amp; crazy-detailed overview, check out Rob Galbraith&#8217;s review. What follows is explicitly not that. Rather, it&#8217;s off-the-cuff impressions from a guy who normally carries a 5D and who didn&#8217;t have the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}