Photos taken with the Nikon Coolpix P5000 as an assessment of its photo quality.
Lori Grunin
I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.
I would expect to see this level of barrel distortion on a 28mm-equivalent lens, not a relatively wide 36mm-equivalent model such as the P5000's. It's pretty symmetrical from side to side and top to bottom, though, which makes it far easier to correct in software.
In practice, the difference between colors at various ISO sensitivity settings affects more than just side-by-side comparisons of color charts. For example, if you're trying to achieve the warmer colors of the photo on the right and bump up your ISO setting, you won't necessarily like the cooler rendering of the photo on the left.
Though photos look OK at small scale, the noise in the P5000's photos becomes seriously intrusive starting at about ISO 800. At 100 percent, you can clearly see the P5000's rather unusual noise pattern.
Because of the strong breeze blowing while I shot with the P5000, many of my handheld macro shots weren't quite as sharp as I'd have liked. The Vibration Reduction helped--I have no doubt they'd have been a lot worse without it. The bigger problem I had was the inability to see the LCD in bright sunlight. (You can't use the optical viewfinders on snapshot cameras in macro mode.) Many times, I had to simply shoot blind and hope for the best.
The P5000 is capable of shooting some very sharp photos, without erring on the side of algorithmic oversharpening. In addition, the lens maintains sharpness extremely well from edge to edge.
Though the P5000 produces very accurate, neutral renderings at ISO 64, it's one of the worst cameras we've seen when it comes to maintaining color consistency throughout the ISO sensitivity range. We usually see shifts begin to occur above ISO 400, but the P5000 renders color differently at every ISO level. The color consistency of the Casio Exilim EX-Z1050, another 10-megapixel model, is shown for comparison.
