Nikon announces Coolpix P6000 with GPS
by Volker Weber
Nikon has announced its flagship compact, the Coolpix P6000. Built around a 13.5 megapixel, 1/1.72 inch sensor (0.41 square cm), the camera has a 4x zoom starting at a respectably wide-angle - equivalent to 28mm. It also records RAW files in a new NRW format that can be converted in-camera or with the forthcoming Windows version of View NX or Windows Imaging Component compatible applications. The other stand-out feature is the inclusion of built-in GPS logging of the locations at which images were recorded. It is expected to start shipping in September for around $500/£429.99/€575.00.
Comments
Great specs, but boy, is that an old-fashioned looking camera. On first glance I figured it was something from the 1980s...
love it - except for the tiny chip with the brazillions of pixel fighting for space and light.
Stuart, I think that is actually a great appeal. I don't like the fake metal surface of consumer cameras.
But 4x optical zoom? Does even low-end consumers want that today? I have 12x optical om my (2 years old) 5MP Sony H2, the newer ones have 15x optical zoom.
In my opinion, a good lens and good optical zoom will result in better pictures than a much higher megapixel camera.
Superzooms require a bigger lens and thus a bigger camera. You only need them if you are lazy. :-)
Awesome, no more manual geotagging. I've been wondering why cameras have not offered this until now. Maybe they'll see a combo package of this and the D700 ;-)
Who needs a wired LAN port though?
Honestly, I'll wait for the Micro 4:3 cameras. I like the chip size of those and I think they will be a prefect small camera.
What puzzles me most on this new Nikon camera is the file format (why another RAW format?) and that it can be processed only on Windows. Hopefully third party applications like Lightroom will cover this on the Mac.
Keep in mind that recording latitude and longitude is good for putting your photos on a map, but for little more. When considering documentary purposes, one should also record viewing direction, height of the vantage point, camera body tilt angle (when not using a view camera) and aperture angel (which gets recorded anyway in the EXIF data). Thus, photos can be repeated precisely over large spans of time, even when everything inside the frame has changed since the last cycle.
>$500/¢429.99/€575.00
Is this a typo or did something happend to the exchange rates last week ?
@Haiko: Yepp, I second that - a fluxgate sensor is missing in all that kind of cameras (e.g. RICOH Caplio 500SE). The fluxgate would cost a fraction of the GPS receiver ....
Karl-Henry - Zoom does (almost) always mean you have to make compromises with the quality - especially with the super zooms.
