We picked up a Nikon Coolpix P900 for the Peru trip. It’s a fairly inexpensive bridge camera. Nikon crammed a mind-blowing super-telephoto zoom into a generally adequate camera. We’ve used it for a couple trips now, so here are our thoughts.
Our main camera is a Nikon D500 with a 150-600mm zoom. The D500 is a much better camera – it’s incredibly fast and powerful, but does get heavy. The Nikon D5 is Nikon’s flagship camera. The D500 is a mini-D5 with D5 guts paired to a smaller sensor with a huge round eyepiece with a great, bright optical field of view that includes nice digital overlays with clear displays for shutter/ISO/focus mode/focal point etc, a ton of modes for autofocus, etc. The P900 is a simple camera with a digital eyepiece with too low of a resolution and refresh rate to really like, but it has more reach and is great for daylight outdoor photography of subjects that are reasonably still and general photography in good light.
Here are some photos we took with it in Peru.
For a fairly small, fairly cheap, handheld those are really pretty amazing. For us it’s a great second camera. There’s a lot the D500 will handle better, esp. when birds are moving, light is lower, or speed is key to get a shot. But still it’s nice, it’s light, and great when the lighting is friendly, though very rough in poor light. Also the optical viewfinder isn’t good. Haley and I both used the P900 at various points, and for both of us the viewfinder is the biggest drawback this model has. Apparently the P1000 (which has even more zoom) is better, but it’s such a large camera we didn’t want it for travel photography. I thought it might be some kind of larger video camera since it’s a big long tube with the body build around it. Well worth getting your hands on any model camera in person before buying it if you can.
Above is a gallery of photos we took in Antigua with the P900. I could certainly get better shots with a wide lens on the D500, and sharper shots for much of it, but the P900 was really just fine for this stuff and incredibly handy compared to swapping lenses on the D500.
This camera’s not going to handle indoor lighting well. There are places in broadleaf forests where it’s always going to be too dark for this camera to perform well. You have limited control over the camera’s settings, but generally adequate. “Bird mode” puts you in single point enter focus with shutter and exposure settings that generally work so long as the light’s adequate.
This thing isn’t going to replace the D500. It can lock onto a moving bird in the middle of dark broadleaf forest with rain just starting and still nail the shot. It’s special. But the P900 is good for what it is when the conditions are right.
The Nature Bloggist 