Nikon 1 J1 review

Another prime example of Nikon's over-simplification of the J1 is the lack of manual controls. Nikon's DSLRs do a great job making every function you'd need just a click away, or a spot on a dial, and it ignores that here. There's the shutter press and a dedicated "start recording video" button, and that's about it up top. The mode dial that's normally on top of the camera is on the back, and inexplicably only scrolls between four modes, none of which are Shutter or Aperture Priority, or Manual mode. To get to those, you have to dig into the menu system, which is a pain to do every time you want to switch. The dial isn't full anyway, and it doesn't make sense that Nikon would rather waste the space than include a few more options; once again, simplicity trumps usefulness. The Olympus E-PL3‘s mode dial makes manual shooting a much faster and easier experience, and though the NEX-C3 doesn't have one its menu system is at least easy to navigate.

Since there are so few manual controls, the menu system on this camera is critical, and it's mostly up to the task. Most things are placed where they should be in the menu system, and there aren't so many menus as to be difficult to find. The test the J1 doesn't pass, though, is the "hand it to a stranger" test. Since there aren't many controls, the ones that do exist have to multi-task, doing different things depending on the mode you're in — like when you use the zoom button to change shutter speed or the menu scroll wheel to change aperture, a fact that might take a few minutes and a lot of errant button pressing to figure out. I'd guess most users will use the Auto mode, so this isn't too much of a problem, but there's more of a learning curve than there should be.

The J1 is full of shooting gimmicks that do unusual things with your photos. While you won't find any super-trendy Instagram-style filters, what is present is Motion Snapshot mode, which takes a one-second video before and after a still shot, adds music, and and plays the video before fading into the still shot. It's a neat trick, and always funny given the music choices — you choose Relaxation, Waves, Beauty or Tenderness — but not something I'd ever imagine using except to show off the feature. There's also a slow-motion option in video recording, which shoots five seconds of video at an incredibly high frame rate — 400 or 1200 fps — and then converts it to a minute or so of slow-motion footage. This might actually be useful, except that to shoot that fast the J1 has to shoot at 640 x 240 or 320 x 120 resolutions, which really don't look good anywhere but on your camera's small screen. Also people moving that slowly are creepy.

Smart Photo Selector was the one feature I used more than a couple of times. It shoots 60 photos with one press of the shutter, and algorithmically picks five of them to keep. It tosses out blurry or dark shots, followed by shots where someone is blinking or not smiling, and tries to find the best of the bunch. I can't say for sure that the selector never threw out a good photo, but it did always leave me with a couple of good ones to choose from.

As long as lighting is good, the J1 takes excellent photos. I used the camera to shoot at a farm, and photos of animals, running children, and landscapes all turned out sharp, with accurate and rich colors. When the camera is able to use a fast shutter speed, it produces nice results. As soon as you move indoors or shoot in anything other than broad daylight, though, the camera’s quality drops like a stone. The small sensor forces the shutter to stay open a long time in low-light situations, which means blurry images when you're not shooting a still life from a tripod. You can also crank up the camera’s ISO sensitivity as high as ISO 3200; it does all right, but having to choose between soft images at high ISOs and blurry images at low ones is a bummer of a trade-off. Taking sharp pictures of my cousin throwing a football was easy in the daylight, but as the sun set he started to look more like a phantom moving through the night, unable to be captured standing still — even when he was standing still.

When you shoot with a DSLR, you do it both for the quality and the style — the soft-background feel that makes subjects pop. The J1 can't do that. The small sensor can't take in much light at a time, so the J1 is mostly unable to do any kind of focusing magic. The problem could be somewhat compensated for by a super-bright lens, but there isn't one available for the J1, so if you're looking for bokeh and soft backgrounds, look elsewhere.

There's a button on the back of the camera that slides to the left to pop up a cheap, periscope-looking flash that I can't look at without thinking it belongs in Wall-E. It sticks up precariously a couple of inches above the camera, and is bright given how small it is, but it won't adjust or rotate, which means using it as a bounce flash (which provides more natural-looking light) is impossible. It's nice that there's one included at all, since neither Olympus' Micro Four Thirds cameras nor the NEX shooters have one, but it's not a good flash, and since there's no accessory port you can't add on a better one like you can with its competitors.

I was impressed with the J1's video recording capabilities. The camera can shoot 1080i/60, 1080p/30, or 720p/60 video, and all three looked good, though both 1080 settings produced slightly over-saturated blacks that made the whole video feel a bit dark. 720p60 is always my favorite mode for shooting, because it captures action so smoothly. The camera can zoom and autofocus while recording video, and it does it both quickly and quietly — that's a rare feat for any camera. It can also shoot a still image while recording video, without any noticeable effect on either except that the still image takes on the same 16:9 aspect ratio as the video.

The camera's real strong suit is its speed: it is blazing fast, in nearly every operation. Autofocus is one of the most noticeable, locking on almost immediately with a half-press of the shutter. By default, it's always looking to focus, so even by the time you frame your shot it's already in focus. You can turn off this setting, and you might want to — cool as it is, it's a huge drain on the battery. The J1's fast enough to handle action shots, or capturing quick moments; the focus never once slowed me down in using the J1. The one tradeoff with this super speed is that it's not very consistent; the J1 would often pick a different thing to focus on every time I half-pressed the shutter, and I'd have to do it a few times before I got the actual subject in focus.

The camera takes about two seconds to turn on, and then shoots with virtually no shutter lag or recycle time — though if you shoot continuously, the camera slows down significantly after about 40 shots. As long as you have excellent light, and don't run into the slow-shutter-speed problem, the camera is great for action shots.