Nikon VQA100EA COOLPIX P950, Black

Product Information

Looking to upgrade your equipment? Get competitive prices on major brands with our part-exchange service. Again, as before, automatic white balance is excellent, producing accurate colours under a variety of different lighting conditions. Though specific white balance presets are available, you might find little need to use them - especially with the addition of raw format shooting support. Still images: JPEG, RAW (NRW) (Nikon’s own format); Movies: MP4 (Video: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Audio: AAC stereo)

Nikon Coolpix P950 Review | Photography Blog

The Nikon Coolpix P950 has a single SD UHS-I memory card slot. It would have been nice to perhaps see some UHS-II compatibility here to boost the frame rate beyond the 7fps offered. In practical terms, you can shoot wide-angle views, similar to what the main lens on most smartphones captures, zoom in to bring distance subjects to view, or anywhere in between. There are some trade-offs made, with the sensor size being one, and the lens aperture another. It opens up to a very reasonable f/2.8, but it drops off as you zoom, eventually settling in at f/6.3. The Nikon Coolpix P950's 83x zoom lens provides an astonishing focal range of 24-2000mm in 35mm terms, as demonstrated below. At first glace you'd be forgiven for thinking the P950 was a DSLR camera, such is its bulk and exterior design. However, the camera and lens are a single fixed unit and cannot be separated. Though the P950 is slightly bigger than the P900 at 140.2 x 109.6 x 149.8mm, it's appreciably smaller the seriously hefty P1000, and also lighter at 1005g. But even this size and weight is still significantly more than a DSLR like Nikon's D5600 equipped with a 18-55mm kit lens.may be less important to you if you’re not often shooting videos, but it’s good to have it available for travel/holiday clips and family videos. Run F-P950-V13W.exe to extract the firmware to a sub-folder in the new folder. The resulting file and folder hierarchy is shown below: I tried to get a few shots of some red kites as they circled above me but I found it impossible to frame them and get them sharp at the longest point of the lens. Fixed an issue that caused pairing between the camera and devices running the SnapBridge app under iOS 14 or iPadOS 14 to fail. We've got no complaints with the P950's electronic viewfinder, though. This has been upgraded from the 0.2-inch, 921k-dot LCD EVF found in the P900, and the P950 gets a 0.39-inch, 2359k-dot OLED unit. The size and resolution increase makes the EVF genuinely useful in the P950, whereas you'd need to be a big fan of squinting to find the P900's EVF any use.

Nikon Coolpix P950 - BirdGuides Nikon Coolpix P950 - BirdGuides

In actual real-world use, it’s likely that you’ll get more than the quoted amount – you can safely expect it to last a day of moderate use. If you do find you need to charge it while on the go, another improvement from the predecessor is the addition of USB charging. Image and video quality Framing scenes at very long focal lengths can be challenging, and to help, Nikon provides two tools: one is built-in, and one is an optional accessory. The built-in helper is a 'snap' zoom button on the lens barrel, which scoots the lens out from extreme telephoto to approx. 350mm equiv to help you re-frame a shot if you lose your subject at 2000mm. The second tool is the (arguably over-engineered but very cool) accessory ' dot sight', which clips onto the P950's hotshoe and provides an optical target-finder so that you don't need to rely on the EVF. It's this portability and zoom reach versus image quality trade-off that you'll need to seriously consider if you're deciding whether or not to buy a P950. While this is a camera that's capable of getting your closer to a distant subject than almost any other camera can, this is also its only selling point. Strip away the colossal zoom and the P950 performs much like a basic point-and-shoot camera, and one which even a mid-range camera phone will thrash in terms of image quality. Never miss a hard to reach shot with the help of the bright and large 8.1 cm (3.2 in) 921k-dot LCD monitor. It can be tilted and twisted in almost any direction. A large dial on the top of the camera lets you set the exposure mode and there are two dials for adjusting the exposure settings in manual mode.

With up to 83x optical zoom available, it’s important to discuss how well the zoom performs. The biggest problem is that aperture narrows to f/6.3 at the furthest reach, so if light is anything but optimal, you might see some obvious loss in image quality, even at reasonably small sizes. I took care to ensure that the front element of the lens was clean, and clear of water droplets, but there’s flare in quite a few of my images when the sun is at 90-degrees to the lens. Nikon has upgraded the electronic viewfinder from a 0.5 cm (0.2-inch) 921,000-dot LCD on the P900 to a 1 cm (0.39-inch) 2,359,000-dot OLED on the P950. That’s an improvement in size, resolution and technology. Despite keeping the resolution the same while increasing its size, the P950’s screen gives a good preview of the scene. It’s also handy to be able to angle it to give a clear view whether you’re shooting upright or landscape format images. On a related note, if you tend to shoot mostly at one or other end of the P950's zoom, you can save time on startup by presetting your desired default focal length via the camera's menu.