The Nikon Coolpix P900 is Nikon’s latest ultra-zoom camera, and features the World’s longest optical zoom lens, with an 83x optical zoom lens, equivalent to 24mm wide-angle zooming to 2000mm at the telelphoto end.
Check out this video shot by German nature-lover Lothar Lenz with Nikon’s Coolpix P900 which zooms-in to apparently capture the movement of the Moon. As the 1.5-minute video progresses, the camera gets closer and closer to the moon, showing the many craters and marks on the surface.
Build
Nikon Coolpix P900 weighs just approximately 899g (with battery and SD memory card) and has dimensions of 139.5mm (width) x 103.2mm (height) x 137.4mm (depth). It feels well built with a solid plastic body and sports a DSLR-style textured handgrip and thumb-rest for a comfortable grasp. The lens sticks out about four inches from the body when the camera is off, heading into full zoom adds about another 3.5 inches to that length. With such a small body and such a big lens, the P900 is certainly weighted towards the front of the camera. The camera is moderately large but when compared most cameras with zoom of this level, the Nikon P900 is relatively portable.
With an approximately 921k-dot 3-inch vari-angle TFT LCD monitor, it gives you the flexibility to turn the screen in different ways to shoot from high or low angle shots.
Focal Range
The COOLPIX P900 is equipped with an 83x optical zoom lens that supports super-telephoto shooting at the equivalent of up to 2000 mm1 (up to 166x2when Dynamic Fine Zoom is used).
The 4.3-357mm f/2.8-6.5 lens has 35mm equivalent optical zoom range of 24-2000mm, which lets you shoot far-away subjects such as wildlife, sporting events, or even the moon.
With the zoom lens fully extended, you’ll be able to see faraway details your eye can’t even make out. If you lose sight of your subject while zoomed in, press the Snap-Back Zoom button for a quick zoomed-out view. Find your subject again and then release the button—the COOLPIX P900 will zoom right back in.
Not only does the lens provide an enormous amount of zoom range, it’s also quite bright, especially at wide angle. With a 24mm-equivalent focal length at the widest, its aperture is a bright f/2.8
Dual Detect Optical VR
With such longer lenses, it becomes difficult to have blur-free shots without stabilization. Thankfully, Nikon’s new impressive 5.0 stops* Dual Detect Optical VR improves VR performance using enhanced detection accuracy to help keep your photos sharp and your videos steady even during handheld shooting at a high zoom ratio.
Autofocus
Autofocusing is generally pretty quick, especially when shooting in good light. Speeds tend to get a little slower when the camera is trying to focus on subjects which are at the far end of the telephoto range, but that’s to be expected.
Image Quality
With an impressive 16.1 effective megapixels and an EXPEED C2 image-processing engine, the P900 provides sharp imagery with rich and vibrant colours.
Nikon Coolpix P900 doesn’t shoot in raw format. Sharpness is reasonably good overall including the extreme wide and tele ends. At 2000mm, there is a little bit of softness, but remember it is 2000mm!
The Nikon Coolpix P900’s image stabilisation does a great job in keeping images blur free, but you’ll probably struggle a little more in lower light conditions. Automatic white balance is excellent, producing accurate colours in the majority of conditions, even under artificial light.
Snapbridge: Built-in Wi-Fi ,NFC & GPS
Nikon snapbridge allows you to quickly and easily share photos wirelessly from your Wi-Fi & NFC enabled COOLPIX P900 to a compatible smartphone or tablet. You can track detailed location information such as longitude, latitude and distance between buildings or landmarks at higher speeds and accuracy with GPS, GLONASS, and QZSS support.
There’s no doubt that the Nikon P900 has the best zoom in the market currently and it works well for macro to telephoto shots. If zoom is your thing, it’s definitely worth a look. What we didn’t like was it’s cost which is more than some standard entry-level DSLRs. Unfortunately, it has no Environmental Sealing and does not offer RAW shooting. So, it’s best for people who shoot JPEG and are more into web-sharing or taking prints no bigger than 8”x10”. If you plan on printing bigger than 11”x14” or simply want to view your files at 100%, this is definitely not the right choice for you.
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