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The Nikon 1 J1 can be a stylish compact system camera using a 10-megapixel “CX” format sensor along with the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Boasting continuous shooting speeds as high as 60 fps at full resolution, Full HD video capture, an ultra-fast hybrid auto-focus system, Smart Photo Selector as well as a unique Motion Snapshot Mode, the portable Nikon J1 even offers more conventional shooting modes like Programmed Auto, Aperture and Shutter Priority, and also Metered Manual. Also fully briefed is a built-in pop-up flash with a guide number of 5, a 3 inch rear display as well as an electronic shutter. Pricing $649.95 / 549.99 with a 10-30mm standard zoom lens, $699.95 / 599.99 having a 10mm pancake lens, or $799.95 / 699.99 within a double-lens kit using the 10-30mm and 30-110mm zoom lenses, the Nikon 1 J1 is scheduled to take sale later this month.

The Nikon 1 J1 is generally created from aluminium with magnesium alloy reinforced parts which is therefore heavier than you would think determined by its size alone, weighing in at 234g for that body only. Additionally, it feels better quality as opposed to official product shots would have you believe. Having an essentially grip-less design, the Nikon J1 is extremely much a two-handed affair that will need that you hold the camera’s weight within the left-hand, clutching the lens, and use your right hand for balance and operating the controls. A great a very important thing because it pushes you to look closely at holding your camera properly, which experts claim goes further towards avoiding shake-induced blur with your photos.

The camera’s clean, minimalist front plate is dominated by the all-new Nikon 1 lens mount. Rather than to be a scaled-down version of the classic F mount, it is just a fresh design that gives 100% electronic communication involving the attached lens as well as the camera body, for twelve contacts. Just like within the manufacturer’s F-mount SLR cameras, there is a white dot for straightforward lens alignment, though it has moved in the 2 o’clock position (when viewed front on) up with the mount. The lenses themselves feature a short silver ridge on the lens barrel, which ought to be in alignment with said dot to enable you to be capable of attach the lens to your camera. Although this may necessitate a little adjusting to, this task makes changing lenses quicker and easier.

Without any lens attached, you can observe the sensor sitting right behind the plane in the bayonet mount. Such as mount itself, the sensor is brand new. Measuring 13.2×8.8mm this “CX” format imaging chip has double surface of the most popular imagers utilized in compact and bridge cameras such as Fujifilm X10 and S100FS, but only about 50 % the vicinity of your standard Four Thirds sensor. In linear terms, a Four Thirds chip features a 1.36x longer diagonal than the Nikon CX imager. Provided that Four Thirds features a 2x focal length multiplier, the CX “crop factor” calculates to about 2.72, and therefore a 10mm lens has approximately precisely the same angle of view being a 27.2mm lens by using an FX or 35mm film camera. The Nikon 1 Nikkor 10-30mm standard zoom is thus the same as a 27.2-81.6mm (or, practically speaking, 28-80mm) FX lens when it comes to its angle-of-view range.

Other Nikon J1’s faceplate is almost empty, featuring just the lens release, a receiver for the optional ML-L3 infrared handy remote control, two narrow slits for that microphone either sides of the lens, with an AF assist/self-timer lamp. There is not any grip in any way for the front with the Nikon 1 J1.

There’s 2 options for powering on the Nikon 1 J1. You can either use the on/off button sitting next to the shutter release or, should you have a collapsible-barrel contact lens attached, you can simply press the unlocking button around the lens barrel and turn the zoom ring to unlock the lens, an act which causes the digital camera to change on automatically. It is really an ingenious solution as you have to unlock the lens for shooting anyway. Start-up takes about a 2nd - not even attempt to write home about but nonetheless decent and entirely adequate.

You can frame your shots using the rear screen - there isn’t any electronic viewfinder as around the V1 model, an important difference between the two. The LCD screen is a three-inch, 460,000-dot display that features wide viewing angles, great definition and accurate colours only so-so visibility in strong daylight. We missed the EVF with all the J1 alongside the V1, either in bright sunlit conditions or while using the 30-110mm telezoom lens as holding you nearly eye-level helped to stabilise the lens and avoid trembling camera.

The control layout is pretty peculiar. The Nikon 1 J1 features a small, rear-mounted mode dial that lacks a lot of the shooting modes that are usually situated on similar dials - particularly P, A, S and M - though it has enough room to allow for them. These modes are available on the J1 however, you need to dive in the rather long-winded instead of entirely logical menu to discover them. The J1’s mode dial just has four settings, Photo, Video, Motion Snapshot and Smart Photo Selector. The four-way controller also offers four functions mapped onto its Up, Right, Down and Left buttons; including AE/AF-Lock, exposure compensation, flash mode and self-timer, respectively. Although this isn’t a bad choice of functions, the fact there is absolutely no ISO button will doubtlessly create a lots of photographers serious about acquiring the Nikon J1 to be unhappy.

There’s a button for the rear labelled “F” but alas, this is not a programmable function button. In Photo mode, it lets you quickly select from the continuous shooting modes, during Video mode it lets you toggle between regular and slow-motion recording. There’s 2 more vital controls around the back with the camera, including a scroll wheel around the four-way pad along with a rocker switch marked having a loupe icon. The scroll wheel is needed setting the shutter speed in Manual and Shutter Priority modes (when you’ve found them in the menu, which is), even though the rocker switch controls the aperture. Precisely why it’s a loupe icon next to it is until this control is needed to zoom in upon an image to evaluate for critical focus in Playback mode. Last but not least, you will find four small buttons across the navigation pad, flush from the rear panel in the camera, including Display Mode, Playback, Menu and Delete.

So what on earth are the type shooting modes around the mode dial information about? The Photo or Still Image mode, marked which has a green camera icon, is to try and should be most of the time. Using the mode dial set to this particular position, you’ll be able to pick your desired exposure mode from the menu. The Nikon J1’s Scene Auto Selector is a smart automatic mode when the camera analyses the scene looking at its lens and picks what it thinks will be the right way of that particular scene. Also you can select one with the conventional PASM modes, which give you full menu access plus the ability to manually set the aperture, shutter speed, or both (Program AE Shift can be purchased in P mode). ISO and white balance will also be manually selected, but only through the menu, as stated previously.

Needless to say there’s AWB and auto ISO too, together with the latter being released three flavours (Auto 100-400, 100-800 or 100-3200) allowing you to specify how high you desire the digital camera to visit if the light gets low. You can also pick from three AF Area modes, including Auto Area, the location where the camera takes charge of what it really focusses on (this isn’t a fantastic mode to have as the default as being the camera obviously can’t read your brain and will concentrate on something different than your actual subject); Single Point, in places you can decide among 135 AF points by first hitting OK after which moving the active AF point throughout the frame utilizing the four-way pad; and Subject Tracking, the place you pick your subject, press OK and permit the camera to monitor that subject mainly because it moves around, providing doesn’t necessarily leave the frame of course.

The Nikon 1 J1 has an intriguing hybrid auto-focus system that mixes contrast- and phase-difference detection similarly because the Fujifilm F300EXR did. This allows the Nikon 1 J1 to focus extremely quickly in good light, even using a moving subject. The business claims the Nikon 1 system cameras are the fastest-focusing machines in the world, which matches our experience - as long as there’s enough light. When light levels drop, your camera switches to contrast-detect AF which, though faster than on most cameras, isn’t as soon as one other method. It’s always the digital camera that decides which AF method to use - anyone has no relation to this.

Usually, the J1 will usually only make use of 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 is additionally possible, however the Nikon 1 lenses don’t have focus rings. In order to focus manually, you first of all have to hit the AF button, choose MF, press OK then makes use of the scroll wheel to modify focus. To be of assistance using this, the Nikon J1 magnifies the central part of the image and displays a rudimentary focus scale down the right side with the frame - but those are definitely the only focusing aids you get. There is no peaking function available as on some rival models.

The J1 comes with an electronic shutter (the V1 also has a mechanical shutter). It is absolutely silent (the focus confirmation beep could be disabled in the menu) and allows the usage of shutter speeds you wish 1/16,000th of an second and, using the Electronic Hi setting selected, permits you to shoot full-resolution stills at 60 fps. Note however that although that is a major achievement, it’s limited by a buffer that can only hold 12 raw files. Additionally, the use of this mode precludes AF tracking - you must lower the frame rate to 10fps if you’d like that -, plus the viewfinder goes blank even though the pictures are increasingly being taken. The only application we can visualize where shooting full-resolution stills at 60fps could really be convenient is AE bracketing for HDR imaging. Only at that rate, a few 5 bracketed shots could possibly be taken in a lot less than 0.1 second, rendering small movements that can otherwise pose alignment problems - like leaves being blown inside the wind - a non-issue. Alas, the Nikon J1 will not offer a real feature - the truth is no offer autoexposure bracketing in any respect.

Trying film mode, the Nikon 1 J1 has some pleasant surprises here. Above all, you may be set to shoot Full HD footage, and you also even arrive at pick from 1080p @ 30fps or 1080i @ 60fps, based on whether you’d rather work together with progressive or interlaced video. If you don’t need Full HD, in addition there are 720p @ 60fps, that is really smooth yet still counts as high-definition. Secondly, you obtain full manual treating exposure in video mode. It is deemed an option; it’s not necessary to shoot in M mode and you can if that’s what you require. Thirdly, you get fast, continuous AF in video mode, and delay well, specifically in good light. Movies are compressed while using the H.264 codec and stored as MOV files. There are separate shutter release buttons for stills and video, and due to this - along with the massive processing power from the Nikon J1 - you may take multiple full-resolution stills even while recording HD video. This works the other way round too - it is possible to capture a film clip even when the mode dial influences Still Image position, simply by pressing the red movie shutter release. We’ve found that in such a case your camera will invariably record the playback quality at 720p/60fps.

As well as being efficient at shooting regular movies in HD quality, the Nikon 1 J1 could also shoot video at 400fps for slow-motion playback. The resolution is lower as well as the aspect ratio is an ultra-widescreen 2.67:1, though the quality is adequate for YouTube, Vimeo and so on. These videos are played back at 30fps, and that is over 13x slower compared to capture speed of 400fps, permitting you to get creative and prove to the world a multitude of interesting phenomena that happen too rapidly to watch instantly. The Nikon J1 goes a step forward by a 1200fps video mode, but the resolution and overall quality is just too big poor to the to get genuinely useful.

The next icon about the mode dial stands for Smart Photo Selector. This feature allows the camera to capture at least 20 photos at a single press on the shutter release, including some which were taken before fully depressing the button. The camera analyses the individual pictures inside series and discards 15 of those, keeping merely the five it thinks should be when it comes to sharpness and composition. This feature may be genuinely useful when photographing fast action and fleeting moments.

Finally, you will find there’s so-called Motion Snapshot mode where the camera records a concise high-definition movie - whose buffering starts for a half-press on the shutter release, so again includes events that had happened prior to a button was fully depressed - and as well uses a still photograph. The movie and the still image are stored in separate files however the camera can combine them into a single slow-motion clip with music. It’s fun but we can not really envision people by using this shooting mode frequently. (When you comprehend the video with a computer, it’ll play back at normal speed, without sound, and this mode is basically only interesting if you look at the clip in-camera or hook the digital camera up to an HDTV by using an HDMI cable.)

The Nikon J1 stores pics and vids on SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, and props up fastest UHS-I speed class. The camera runs on a smaller EN-EL20 battery to its V1 larger, and is particularly consequently able to produce considerably less shots for a passing fancy charge, managing around 230, even though it helps to make the camera body smaller sized. The camera’s tripod socket is made from metal and is in line with all the lens’ optical axis. This actually also implies that changing batteries or cards is not possible whilst the J1 is placed on a tripod, because the hinges with the battery/card compartment door are too nearby the tripod mount.

So, how did we love to while using Nikon 1 J1? On one hand, we liked it a whole lot. In good light, its auto-focus technique is indeed faster than just about anything we’ve used until now, having the ability to track and lock consentrate on a range of truly fast-moving subjects, and yielding a great deal of sharp images in situations where our keeper rates haven’t been high. 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.

Conversely, the Nikon J1 has its own share of frustrating idiosyncrasies applying the user interface that forces you to dive to the menu to gain access to functions as easy as exposure mode, ISO speeds and white balance. While Nikon obviously cannot add extra buttons to your finished product, they can at least have the “F” button customisable via a firmware update. Also, nevertheless there is a passionate button for exposure compensation - a positive thing - I did not try to activate a live histogram, eventhough it would’ve made exposure compensation considerably more useful and to use. Again, this may likely to end up fixed in firmware.

We also missed the V1’s smooth, high-resolution electronic viewfinder, particularly bright light or aided by the telephoto lens which doesn’t lend itself well to being held out at arms length. The J1 merely has a glass dust shield because it’s defense against unwanted debris, instead of the more proactive sensor cleaning unit the V1 offers, as well as the smaller battery signifies that you should buy a supplementary anyone to get through a day’s heavy shooting. Having less an accessory port means that almost none of the Nikon 1 accessories are works with the J1, such as external flash and GPS unit.

Something more important we didn’t like was that the camera would always show the image just taken a couple of seconds onscreen, and now we didn’t are able to turn this instant postview function completely off (while you can at least cancel it via a half-press of the shutter release). Finally, while the camera is normally fast and responsive, the camera takes far too long to wake up from sleep mode if this may be idle for a while, contributing to numerous missed shots.

That being said, the Nikon 1 J1 is often a smaller than average and compact, high-performance system camera they like its your government might use a couple of tweaks to the program to raised suit the requirements serious amateurs. The intended market you work in of casual users will like it for the sheer speed, built-in flash, lightweight and the fun features it gives you. We will now discover how the Nikon 1 J1 fared from the image quality department.