Nikon P7000 - User report

Geranium - The Nikon P7000 excels at macro shots like this, partly because of the depth of field made possible by the small sensor.

Last summer I replaced my 8 year old Nikon 4300 point and shoot, which had started to act flaky, with a  Nikon P7000. Of course by now the P7000 is old news, having been replaced by the P7100, but the newer camera is mostly the same, with a few enhancements including an articulated display.

The P7000 was not meant to replace my DSLR, but I have found that I am using the smaller camera much more than I expected, and have posted many of the results from this camera on Photography In Place. If you are interested in a fairly technical discussion of my experience with this camera, keep reading.

The P7000 is quite large for a camera of this class, but it still can be carried in a jacket pocket or a large pants pocket. I have it with me most of the time (not in my pocket though) and find it convenient and easy to use. I shoot in RAW mode, and the quality of the images is surprisingly good.

The 10MB raw file is not quite as robust or flexible as the files from the DSLR, but are certainly good enough, and often rival the images from the DSLR, particularly in smaller sizes for web display. The camera's auto-exposure works well, making the P7000 a very reliable "point and shoot." I do find that except in very flat lighting conditions, between -1/3 and -1 stop exposure compensation is necessary to avoid blown highlights. Shadows can usually be adequately recovered in post processing and any resulting noise cleans up well. (I use Topaz DeNoise.)

One of the reasons I chose the P7000 was that it has an optical viewfinder. In bright conditions, the LCD display can be very difficult to work with, and the optical viewfinder, for all its faults, is necessary. The optical viewfinder is small, and only shows about 85% of the image area, but it still enables one to keep working when the LCD screen is washed out by the sun.I find that I do like working with the LCD display in many situations, in large part because of the freedom to position the camera with a flexibility that is impossible when the camera must be held up to the eye.

I leave the white balance setting on automatic, and the P7100 generally does a pretty good job, although in some conditions, particularly outdoors in the shade or on an overcast day, the white balance shifts too much toward blue. This is easily corrected in post processing if one shoots in RAW mode, but could be a problem for JPEGs.

My early experience with the P7000's auto-focus was disappointing. The camera often struggled to lock on focus, and even more frustratingly, refused to focus at all in some situations. Upgrading the firmware helped. Although I prefer to use center point focus, advice I read from another P7000 user who experienced similar issues suggested that leaving the camera on the default automatic focus area setting improved the performance considerably. It does, although the camera still struggles occasionally and doesn't always lock focus where I want the it to be. I would have to say that the auto-focus system is the weak point of this camera. I can't say that it is worse than other camera in this class, because I haven't used any of the P7000's competitors.

Overall, I am happy with the P7000 and expect it will continue to play an important role in my photography.  The old saying is that the best camera is the one you have with you, and I expect to have the P7000 with me when the DSLR is just too much to lug around.