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The Nikon 1 J1 is usually a stylish compact system camera with a 10-megapixel “CX” format sensor along with the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Boasting continuous shooting speeds all the way to 60 fps at full resolution, Full HD video capture, an ultra-fast hybrid auto-focus system, Smart Photo Selector and a unique Motion Snapshot Mode, the portable Nikon J1 even offers more conventional shooting modes like Programmed Auto, Aperture and Shutter Priority, along with Metered Manual. Also fully briefed is a built-in pop-up flash with a guide number of 5, a 3 inch rear display and an electronic shutter. Costing $649.95 / 549.99 using a 10-30mm the len’s, $699.95 / 599.99 using a 10mm pancake lens, or $799.95 / 699.99 in a very double-lens kit together with 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 generally created from aluminium with magnesium alloy reinforced parts and is particularly therefore heavier than you would think dependant on its size alone, weighing in at 234g to the body only. Furthermore, it feels better made compared to the official product shots maybe have you believe. Having an essentially grip-less design, the Nikon J1 can be quite much a two-handed affair that will require that you support the camera’s weight inside the left-hand, clutching the lens, and employ your right hand for balance and operating the controls. This is actually an excellent since it forces you to take note of holding the camera properly, which experts claim goes quite a distance towards avoiding shake-induced blur as part of your photos.

The camera’s clean, minimalist front plate is dominated by the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. As opposed to like a scaled-down version from the out of date F mount, it’s really a brand-new design that provides 100% electronic communication between your attached lens and also the camera body, courtesy of several contacts. The same as on the manufacturer’s F-mount SLR cameras, there’s a white dot for straightforward lens alignment, though it has moved from the 2 o’clock position (when viewed front on) to the peak in the mount. The lenses themselves include a short silver ridge on the lens barrel, which must be in alignment with said dot to ensure you to definitely be capable of attach the lens on the camera. While this may require a certain amount of acclamating yourself with, it actually makes changing lenses quicker and easier.

Without the need of lens attached, you can view the sensor sitting right behind the plane from the bayonet mount. Such as mount itself, the sensor is completely new. Measuring 13.2×8.8mm this “CX” format imaging chip has double the amount surface of the most popular imagers found in compact and bridge cameras such as the Fujifilm X10 and S100FS, but only most the spot of the standard Four Thirds sensor. In linear terms, a Four Thirds chip carries a 1.36x longer diagonal versus the Nikon CX imager. Since Four Thirds includes a 2x focal length multiplier, the CX “crop factor” computes to about 2.72, which means a 10mm lens has approximately the same angle of view like a 27.2mm lens by using an FX or 35mm film camera. The Nikon 1 Nikkor 10-30mm standard zoom is thus equal to a 27.2-81.6mm (or, practically speaking, 28-80mm) FX lens regarding its angle-of-view range.

The other Nikon J1’s faceplate is nearly empty, featuring only the lens release, a receiver for your optional ML-L3 infrared handheld control, two narrow slits for your microphone spare on both on the lens, plus an AF assist/self-timer lamp. There’s no grip by any means within the front from the Nikon 1 J1.

There’s 2 options for powering on the Nikon1 J1. You can either utilize on/off button sitting next to the shutter release or, if you have a collapsible-barrel contact lens attached, just press the unlocking button within the lens barrel and turn the zoom ring to unlock the lens, an action which causes your camera to exchange on automatically. This is an ingenious solution because you require to unlock the lens for shooting anyway. Start-up takes just over another - not even attempt to write home about but still decent and entirely adequate.

You can frame your shots utilizing the rear screen - there is absolutely no electronic viewfinder as around the V1 model, an integral difference between the 2. The LCD screen is usually a three-inch, 460,000-dot display that boasts wide viewing angles, great definition and accurate colours but only so-so visibility in strong daylight. We missed the EVF when using the J1 alongside the V1, either in bright sunlit conditions or when using the 30-110mm telezoom lens as holding the digital camera as much as eye-level helped to stabilise the lens and prevent camera shake.

The control layout is pretty peculiar. The Nikon 1 J1 includes a small, rear-mounted mode dial that lacks most of the shooting modes that happen to be usually available on similar dials - most notably P, A, S and M - even though it has enough room to support them. These modes can be obtained about the J1 nevertheless, you should dive into the rather long-winded and never entirely logical menu to get them. The J1’s mode dial just has four settings, Photo, Video, Motion Snapshot and Smart Photo Selector. The four-way controller even offers four functions mapped onto its Up, Right, Down and Left buttons; including AE/AF-Lock, exposure compensation, flash mode and self-timer, respectively. Even though this is not a bad range of functions, the reality that there is absolutely no ISO button will doubtlessly produce a wide range of photographers interested in acquiring the Nikon J1 for being unhappy.

There’s a button about the rear labelled “F” but alas, it’s not a programmable function button. In Photo mode, it enables you to quickly choose from the continuous shooting modes, when it is in Video mode it lets you toggle between regular and slow-motion recording. The two main more essential controls for the back with the camera, including a scroll wheel throughout the four-way pad and also a rocker switch marked that has a loupe icon. The scroll wheel is utilized to line the shutter speed in Manual and Shutter Priority modes (when you’ve found them inside menu, that may be), whilst the rocker switch controls the aperture. The reason it offers a loupe icon next to it truly is until this control is employed to focus by using an image to check for critical concentrate Playback mode. Last of all, there are four small buttons about the navigation pad, flush up against the rear panel from the camera, including Display Mode, Playback, Menu and Delete.

So what are shooting modes for the mode dial information on? The Photo or Still Image mode, marked which has a green camera icon, is to will need to be more often than not. Together with the mode dial set to the present position, you are able to pick your desired exposure mode from the menu. The Nikon J1’s Scene Auto Selector is a great automatic mode where the camera analyses the scene facing its lens and picks just what it thinks would be the right way of that one scene. You may also select one of the conventional PASM modes, which present you with full menu access and the chance to manually set the aperture, shutter speed, or both (Program AE Shift will come in P mode). ISO and white balance can also be manually selected, but only in the menu, as stated earlier.

Of course there’s AWB and auto ISO likewise, using the latter coming in three flavours (Auto 100-400, 100-800 or 100-3200) letting you specify how high you desire you to visit when the light gets low. You may also select from three AF Area modes, including Auto Area, the location where the camera takes charge of just what it focusses on (this isn’t a terrific mode to get as your default as being the camera obviously can’t read your thoughts and could concentrate on something different than your actual subject); Single Point, in which you can come up one among 135 AF points frist by hitting OK and after that moving the active AF point round the frame while using four-way pad; and Subject Tracking, the place you pick your subject, press OK and permit the digital camera to track that subject because it moves around, provided that doesn’t necessarily leave the frame of course.

The Nikon 1 J1 posseses an intriguing hybrid auto-focus system that combines contrast- and phase-difference detection in a similar way since the Fujifilm F300EXR did. This will give the Nikon 1 J1 to concentrate extremely quickly in good light, even on a moving subject. The corporation claims the Nikon 1 system cameras are definitely the fastest-focusing machines on earth, and also this matches our experience - providing there’s enough light. When light levels drop, the digital camera switches to contrast-detect AF which, though faster compared to most cameras, isn’t you wish another method. It really is the digital camera that decides which AF approach to use - the person has no influence on this.

Normally, the J1 will often only resort to contrast detection when light levels are low. In good light, we had arrived able to take sharp photos of fast-moving subjects. The Nikon J1 certainly won’t disappoint here. Manual focusing can also be possible, even though Nikon 1 lenses do not possess focus rings. If you need to focus manually, you firstly must hit the AF button, choose MF, press OK and makes use of the scroll wheel to modify focus. To help you out using this, the Nikon J1 magnifies the central portion of the image and displays a rudimentary focus scale along the right side on the frame - but those include the only focusing aids you get. There is no peaking function available as on some rival models.

The J1 has an electronic shutter (the V1 also offers a mechanical shutter). Itrrrs very silent (the main focus confirmation beep is usually disabled in the menu) and allows using shutter speeds as quickly as 1/16,000th of a second and, with the Electronic Hi setting selected, helps you to shoot full-resolution stills at 60 fps. Note however that although it is a major achievement, it’s tied to a buffer that will only hold 12 raw files. Additionally, the use of this mode precludes AF tracking - you will need to lower the frame rate to 10fps if you would like that -, and the viewfinder goes blank even though the pictures are increasingly being taken. One application we could visualize where shooting full-resolution stills at 60fps could really come in handy is AE bracketing for HDR imaging. Only at that rate, several 5 bracketed shots could possibly be used lower than 0.1 second, rendering small movements that could otherwise pose alignment problems - like leaves being blown inside the wind - a non-issue. Alas, the Nikon J1 does not offer this kind of feature - actually it does not offer autoexposure bracketing in any respect.

Moving on to film mode, the Nikon 1 J1 has some pleasant surprises here. To start with, the camera may be set to shoot Full HD footage, so you even get to pick from 1080p @ 30fps or 1080i @ 60fps, depending on whether you would like to assist progressive or interlaced video. If you can’t need Full HD, additionally, there is 720p @ 60fps, that is really smooth yet still counts as high definition. Secondly, you have full manual control of exposure in video mode. It is deemed an option; you won’t need to shoot in M mode however, you can if that is what exactly you need. Thirdly, you will get fast, continuous AF in video mode, and it works well, particularly good light. Movies are compressed with all the H.264 codec and stored as MOV files. You will discover separate shutter release buttons for stills and video, and because of this - along with the massive processing power from the Nikon J1 - you can take multiple full-resolution stills whilst recording HD video. This works vice versa too - you may capture a film clip even though the mode dial is with the Still Image position, by simply pressing the red movie shutter release. We’ve discovered that in such cases the camera will record the playback quality at 720p/60fps.

As well as being effective at shooting regular movies in HD quality, the Nikon 1 J1 may also shoot video at 400fps for slow-motion playback. The resolution is leaner plus the aspect ratio is an ultra-widescreen 2.67:1, but the quality is adequate for YouTube, Vimeo and so forth. These videos are played back at 30fps, that is more than 13x slower than the capture speed of 400fps, enabling you to get creative and display to the world numerous interesting phenomena which happen straight away to watch in real time. The Nikon J1 goes even further by giving a 1200fps video mode, but the resolution and overall quality is too poor for your for being genuinely useful.

The next icon around the mode dial stands for Smart Photo Selector. This feature allows your camera to capture at the very least 20 photos for a single press in the shutter release, including some which were taken before fully depressing the button. You analyses the person pictures from the series and discards 15 of these, keeping exactly the five which it thinks might be best with regards to sharpness and composition. This feature might be genuinely useful when photographing fast action and fleeting moments.

Finally, there exists a so-called Motion Snapshot mode where the camera records a concise high-definition movie - whose buffering starts for a half-press with the shutter release, so again includes events which have happened prior to button was fully depressed - plus needs a still photograph. The film and also the still image are saved in separate files even so the camera can combine them in to a single slow-motion clip with music. It’s fun but we can not really envision people applying this shooting mode all the time. (When you observe the video using a computer, it is going to play back at normal speed, without sound, so this mode is very only interesting when you look at the clip in-camera or hook the camera around an HDTV with an HDMI cable.)

The Nikon J1 stores pics and vids on SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, and props up the fastest UHS-I speed class. The camera is run on a compact EN-EL20 battery to its V1 your government, and is consequently capable of producing considerably less shots on one charge, managing around 230, although it does help to create the camera body scaled-down. The camera’s tripod socket consists of metal and is also situated line using the lens’ optical axis. And also this implies that changing batteries or cards isn’t feasible as you move the J1 is attached with a tripod, as being the hinges of the battery/card compartment door are so nearby the tripod mount.

So, how did we love to with all the Nikon 1 J1? On one hand, we liked it a great deal. In good light, its auto-focus product is indeed faster than basically anything we’ve used to date, to be able to track and lock target a range of truly fast-moving subjects, and yielding a lot of sharp images in situations where our keeper rates never been very good. Additionally, its high-speed continuous shooting modes have allowed us to capture interesting moments that we’d have surely missed after we had used a slower camera. The built-in pop-up flash proved more useful what has modest guide number might suggest, with the clever design minimising red-eye.

On the other hand, the Nikon J1 has its share of frustrating idiosyncrasies starting with an individual interface that can make you dive in the menu to gain access to functions as common as exposure mode, ISO speeds and white balance. While Nikon obviously cannot add extra buttons to your finished product, they might at least make “F” button customisable with a firmware update. Also, you will find a dedicated button for exposure compensation - the industry a valuable thing - I did not find a way to activate a live histogram, although it would’ve made exposure compensation additional useful and simple to utilize. Again, this can probably be fixed in firmware.

We also missed the V1’s smooth, high-resolution electronic viewfinder, specially in bright light or with all the telephoto lens which does not lend itself well to being held out at arms length. The J1 just has a glass dust shield as it’s defense against unwanted debris, rather than more proactive sensor cleaning unit that this V1 offers, and also the smaller battery means that you’ll want to buy an extra someone to get through a day’s heavy shooting. Lacking an accessory port implies that almost not one of the Nikon 1 accessories are suitable for the J1, such as external flash and GPS unit.

Another thing we failed to like could be that the camera would always show the image just taken for a couple of seconds onscreen, and we wouldn’t be capable of turn this instant postview function completely off (while you can at any rate cancel it using a half-press of the shutter release). Finally, as you move the camera is usually fast and responsive, the digital camera takes far too long to arise from sleep mode if this has become idle for some time, contributing to quite a few missed shots.

With that said, the Nikon 1 J1 is really a small, and compact, high-performance system camera they like its your government would use several tweaks to its user interface to higher suit the needs of serious amateurs. The intended target market of casual users will enjoy it because of its sheer speed, built-in flash, compact size and the fun features it offers. Why don’t we now find out how the Nikon 1 J1 fared inside image quality department.