Article on Nikon 1 J1: Latest Nikon Mirroless Dslrs
The Nikon 1 J1 is often a stylish compact system camera featuring a 10-megapixel “CX” format sensor and also the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Boasting continuous shooting speeds as high as 60 frames per second at full resolution, Full HD video capture, an ultra-fast hybrid auto-focus system, Smart Photo Selector as well as a unique Motion Snapshot Mode, the portable Nikon J1 offers more conventional shooting modes like Programmed Auto, Aperture and Shutter Priority, in addition to Metered Manual. Also fully briefed is really a built-in pop-up flash with a guide volume of 5, a 3 inch rear display and an electronic shutter. Pricing $649.95 / 549.99 which has a 10-30mm contact, $699.95 / 599.99 using a 10mm pancake lens, or $799.95 / 699.99 within a double-lens kit with all the 10-30mm and 30-110mm zoom lenses, the Nikon 1 J1 is scheduled to be on sale later this month.
The Nikon 1 J1 is mainly crafted from aluminium with magnesium alloy reinforced parts and it is therefore heavier than you would think based on its size alone, weighing 234g for your body only. Additionally, it feels better quality versus the official product shots maybe have you believe. With an essentially grip-less design, the Nikon J1 can be quite much a two-handed affair that needs you to secure the camera’s weight inside left hand, clutching the lens, and employ your right hand for balance and operating the controls. This is certainly the good thing the way it forces you to pay attention to holding you properly, which often goes further towards avoiding shake-induced blur in your photos.
The camera’s clean, minimalist front plate is dominated by the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Instead of as a scaled-down version on the good old F mount, it’s a brand spanking new design providing you with 100% electronic communication involving the attached lens and the camera body, from twelve contacts. Much like about the manufacturer’s F-mount SLR cameras, you will find there’s white dot for convenient lens alignment, while it has moved on the 2 o’clock position (when viewed front on) to the top level on the mount. The lenses themselves have a short silver ridge for the lens barrel, which has to be in alignment with said dot to ensure you to definitely have the ability to attach the lens to the camera. Although this may necessitate a bit of getting used to, it actually makes changing lenses quicker and easier.
Without lens attached, you can observe the sensor sitting directly behind the plane in the bayonet mount. Like the mount itself, the sensor is completely new. Measuring 13.2×8.8mm this “CX” format imaging chip has double area of the largest imagers found in compact and bridge cameras such as the Fujifilm X10 and S100FS, only about half the spot of a standard Four Thirds sensor. In linear terms, a Four Thirds chip includes a 1.36x longer diagonal compared to the Nikon CX imager. Considering the fact that Four Thirds has a 2x focal length multiplier, the CX “crop factor” breaks down to to about 2.72, and thus a 10mm lens has approximately the same angle of view being a 27.2mm lens upon an FX or 35mm film camera. The Nikon 1 Nikkor 10-30mm standard zoom is thus similar to a 27.2-81.6mm (or, practically speaking, 28-80mm) FX lens in terms of its angle-of-view range.
All of those other Nikon J1’s faceplate is actually empty, featuring exactly the lens release, a receiver for that optional ML-L3 infrared handy remote control, two narrow slits for your microphone either side with the lens, and an AF assist/self-timer lamp. There isn’t any grip in any respect for the front on the Nikon 1 J1.
There’s two strategies to powering within the Nikon 1 J1. You may use the on/off button sitting next to the shutter release or, if you have a collapsible-barrel zoom lens attached, you can just press the unlocking button about the lens barrel and turn the zoom ring to unlock the lens, an action that creates you to switch on automatically. It becomes an ingenious solution as you have to unlock the lens for shooting anyway. Start-up takes approximately an additional - absolutely nothing to write home about yet still decent and entirely adequate.
It is possible to frame your shots with all the rear screen - there is no electronic viewfinder as within the V1 model, a key distinction between the two. The LCD screen can be a three-inch, 460,000-dot display that features wide viewing angles, great definition and accurate colours but only so-so visibility in strong daylight. We missed the EVF with the J1 alongside the V1, in either bright sunlit conditions or with the 30-110mm telezoom lens as holding you approximately eye-level helped to stabilise the lens avoiding camera shake.
The control layout is very peculiar. The Nikon 1 J1 includes a small, rear-mounted mode dial that lacks a lot of the shooting modes which might be usually seen on similar dials - such as P, A, S and M - eventhough it has enough room to support them. These modes can be found on the J1 and you ought to dive in to the rather long-winded and never entirely logical menu to find them. The J1’s mode dial only has four settings, Photo, Video, Motion Snapshot and Smart Photo Selector. The four-way controller also has four functions mapped onto its Up, Right, Down and Left buttons; including AE/AF-Lock, exposure compensation, flash mode and self-timer, respectively. Of course this isn’t a bad selection of functions, the reality that there is absolutely no ISO button will doubtlessly result in a lot of photographers thinking about getting the Nikon J1 to be unhappy.
You will find there’s button for the rear labelled “F” but alas, this is simply not a programmable function button. In Photo mode, it lets you quickly pick from the continuous shooting modes, while in Video mode it lets you toggle between regular and slow-motion recording. There are 2 more vital controls for the back with the camera, including a scroll wheel round the four-way pad along with a rocker switch marked that has a loupe icon. The scroll wheel can be used to put the shutter speed in Manual and Shutter Priority modes (once you’ve found them inside menu, that is), even though the rocker switch controls the aperture. The key reason why it’s a loupe icon close to it truly is until this control is employed to zoom in with an image to confirm for critical focus in Playback mode. Last but not least, you’ll find four small buttons across the navigation pad, flush against the rear panel from the camera, including Display Mode, Playback, Menu and Delete.
Just what exactly are the types shooting modes for the mode dial about? The Photo or Still Image mode, marked that has a green camera icon, is the place you will want to be usually. While using mode dial set for this position, you may pick your desired exposure mode on the menu. The Nikon J1’s Scene Auto Selector is a great auto mode the location where the camera analyses the scene facing its lens and picks what it thinks will be the right mode for that specific scene. You can even find out on the conventional PASM modes, which provide you with full menu access along with the ability to manually set the aperture, shutter speed, or both (Program AE Shift is available in P mode). ISO and white balance can be manually selected, but only from your menu, as mentioned above.
Of course there’s AWB and auto ISO as well, together with the latter arriving three flavours (Auto 100-400, 100-800 or 100-3200) letting you specify how high you would like the camera to look if your light gets low. You can even choose from three AF Area modes, including Auto Area, when the camera takes control of just what it focusses on (it’s not a terrific mode to possess when your default since the camera obviously can’t read your head and may give attention to something else entirely than your actual subject); Single Point, that you can select one among 135 AF points beginning with hitting OK and after that moving the active AF point about the frame while using four-way pad; and Subject Tracking, the place you pick your subject, press OK and permit the digital camera in order to that subject since it moves around, so long as it won’t leave the frame of course.
The Nikon 1 J1 has a intriguing hybrid auto-focus system that combines contrast- and phase-difference detection in a similar fashion because the Fujifilm F300EXR did. This will give the Nikon 1 J1 to concentrate extremely quickly in good light, even over a moving subject. This company claims the Nikon 1 system cameras are definitely the fastest-focusing machines in the world, this also matches our experience - given that there’s enough light. When light levels drop, you switches to contrast-detect AF which, though faster than you are on most cameras, isn’t as quickly as another method. It really is the camera that decides which AF method to use - the user doesn’t have any impact on this.
In most cases, the J1 will usually only make use of contrast detection when light levels are low. In good light, we had been capable of taking sharp photos of fast-moving subjects. The Nikon J1 certainly isn’t going to disappoint here. Manual focusing is additionally possible, even though the Nikon 1 lenses don’t have focus rings. If you want to focus manually, you first of all have to hit the AF button, choose MF, press OK and utilize scroll wheel to adjust focus. To help you out with this, the Nikon J1 magnifies the central the main image and displays a rudimentary focus scale down the right side with the frame - but those would be the only focusing aids you get. There’s no peaking function available as on some rival models.
The J1 has an electronic shutter (the V1 boasts an analog shutter). It’s completely silent (the main objective confirmation beep might be disabled in the menu) and allows the use of shutter speeds as quickly as 1/16,000th of your second and, with the Electronic Hi setting selected, lets you shoot full-resolution stills at 60 fps. Note however that while this is a major achievement, it’s limited by a buffer that can only hold 12 raw files. Additionally, the utilization of this mode precludes AF tracking - you will need to lower the frame rate to 10fps if you need that -, and the viewfinder goes blank whilst the pictures will be taken. Single thing that it application we can easily visualize where shooting full-resolution stills at 60fps could really be useful is AE bracketing for HDR imaging. When it reaches this rate, some 5 bracketed shots could possibly be consumed lower than 0.1 second, rendering small movements that will otherwise pose alignment problems - like leaves being blown inside wind - a non-issue. Alas, the Nikon J1 won’t offer such a feature - the truth is no offer autoexposure bracketing in any respect.
Getting to the recording mode, the Nikon 1 J1 has some pleasant surprises here. To start with, you might be set to shoot Full HD footage, so you even are able to pick from 1080p @ 30fps or 1080i @ 60fps, determined by whether you’d rather work with progressive or interlaced video. Unless you need Full HD, there’s also 720p @ 60fps, which is really smooth yet still counts as hi-d. Secondly, you obtain full manual control over exposure in video mode. It is deemed an option; you don’t have to shoot in M mode nevertheless, you can if that is what you need. Thirdly, you have fast, continuous AF in video mode, and delay well, particularly good light. Movies are compressed while using the H.264 codec and stored as MOV files. You can find separate shutter release buttons for stills and video, and because of this - along with the massive processing power with the Nikon J1 - you are able to take multiple full-resolution stills while recording HD video. This works vice versa too - you’ll be able to capture a movie clip regardless if the mode dial is in the Still Image position, just by pressing the red movie shutter release. We’ve found that in this case you will usually record the video at 720p/60fps.
In addition to being efficient at shooting regular movies in HD quality, the Nikon 1 J1 may also shoot video at 400fps for slow-motion playback. The resolution is lower and also the aspect ratio can be an ultra-widescreen 2.67:1, but the quality is adequate for YouTube, Vimeo and so forth. These videos are replayed at 30fps, and that is in excess of 13x slower compared to capture speed of 400fps, enabling you to get creative and show the world numerous interesting phenomena which happen too rapidly to observe in real time. The Nikon J1 goes even further by a 1200fps video mode, however the resolution and overall quality is simply too poor for your to become genuinely useful.
Your third icon about the mode dial represents Smart Photo Selector. This feature allows you to capture at least 20 photos for a single press of the shutter release, including some that have been taken before fully depressing the button. You analyses the consumer pictures from the series and discards 15 of these, keeping just the five so it thinks might be best when it comes to sharpness and composition. This feature is usually genuinely useful when photographing fast action and fleeting moments.
Finally, we have a so-called Motion Snapshot mode when the camera records a brief high-definition movie - whose buffering starts with a half-press in the shutter release, so again includes events that had happened before the button was fully depressed - and as well takes a still photograph. The film and also the still image are stored in separate files nevertheless the camera can combine them in a single slow-motion clip with music. It’s fun but we can not really envision people employing this shooting mode often. (When you see the video over a computer, it’s going to play back at normal speed, without sound, this mode is very only interesting should you comprehend the clip in-camera or hook you nearly an HDTV by using an HDMI cable.)
The Nikon J1 stores pics and vids on SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, and supports the fastest UHS-I speed class. The camera operates on a compact EN-EL20 battery to the V1 our government, which is consequently able to produce much less shots using one charge, managing around 230, even though it helps to make the digital camera body small. The camera’s tripod socket is constructed of metal and it is situated line while using lens’ optical axis. This also ensures that changing batteries or cards is not possible as you move the J1 is mounted on a tripod, because hinges from the battery/card compartment door are way too near to the tripod mount.
So, how did we like while using Nikon 1 J1? Similarly, we liked it a good deal. In good light, its auto-focus product is indeed faster than basically anything we’ve used until now, being able to track and lock concentrate on a variety of truly fast-moving subjects, and yielding lots of sharp images in situations where our keeper rates haven’t ever been very high. Additionally, its high-speed continuous shooting modes have allowed us to capture interesting moments that we’d have surely missed whenever we had used a slower camera. The built-in pop-up flash proved more useful that it is modest guide number might suggest, using the clever design minimising red-eye.
However, the Nikon J1 has its own share of frustrating idiosyncrasies beginning from anyone interface that pushes you to dive to the menu to get into functions as common as exposure mode, ISO speeds and white balance. While Nikon obviously cannot add extra buttons to a finished product, they can at the very least make the “F” button customisable by way of a firmware update. Also, you will find an avid button for exposure compensation - a a valuable thing - I didnrrrt try to activate a live histogram, though it would’ve made exposure compensation a lot more useful as well as simple to use. Again, this could oftimes be fixed in firmware.
We also missed the V1’s smooth, high-resolution electronic viewfinder, specially in bright light or while using the telephoto lens which does not lend itself well to being held out at arms length. The J1 only has a glass dust shield because it is defense against unwanted debris, instead of the more proactive sensor cleaning unit that this V1 offers, and also the smaller battery shows that you’ll want to buy an added someone to get through a day’s heavy shooting. The possible lack of an accessory port shows that almost no Nikon 1 accessories are compatible with the J1, such as external flash and GPS unit.
Yet another thing we wouldn’t like was that the camera would always show the picture just taken a couple of seconds onscreen, and that we failed to are able to turn this instant postview function completely off (even though you can at least cancel it via a half-press in the shutter release). Finally, as the camera is normally fast and responsive, the digital camera takes overly long to get up from sleep mode gets hotter has been idle for a time, causing quite a few missed shots.
That being said, the Nikon 1 J1 is really a small , compact, high-performance system camera they like its our government might use some tweaks to its interface to higher suit the needs of serious amateurs. The intended target market of casual users should it because of its sheer speed, built-in flash, lightweight and also the fun features it gives you. We will now observe how the Nikon 1 J1 fared in the image quality department.
Tags: j1, mirroless cameras, nikon, nikon 1, nikon 1 j1, nikon 1 v1, nikon cameras, nikon1, v1