Phew! Nikon week at IR - *Detailed* First Look posted for Nikon Coolpix 5700!
By
Dave Etchells
(Wednesday, May 29, 2002 - 03:22 EDT)
Nikon's stunning-looking 5 megapixel, 8x optical zoom digital camera in Dave's capable hands...
This has been a heckuva week, no small thanks to Nikon USA! Last Wednesday, FedEx showed up with no less than four new Nikon cameras - The D100 (incredible SLR), and three new consumer models, the 5700, 4500, and 2000. As luck would have it, I was also right in the middle of an enormous offline project (stay tuned for more about that next week), so it was a real scramble, to say the least.
In the end, I elected to do a little triage, opting to leave the lower-end Coolpix 2000 go until next week, so I could put up complete treatments of the 4500, 5700, and D100. I have the 4500 and 5700 ready for you today, to coincide with Nikon's official announcement of the products, and should have the D100 up in the next couple of days.
The 4500, 5700, and 2000 were all prototypes, fully functional but without the final tweaks to color and image quality that always get made up to the last minute. Consequently, no sample images to share from them yet, but I've got full data on every other aspect of their operation.
I'll lead off with the 5700, since that's the consumer model that'll probably excite the most interest. You can see by the thumbnail shot above right that this is something other than just another model in the Coolpix line. That's a full 8x zoom lens, the longest-ratio lens by far to appear in the Coolpix line. There's also a 5 megapixel CCD behind it, and the obligatory electronic viewfinder (EVF) that must accompany such a long zoom, for cost/manufacturability reasons.
This looks like a very intriguing camera, sure to excite a lot of interest and speculation. Of course, the real determining factor in its ultimate success will be its image quality. Stay tuned for that, I'll get a full update posted as soon as Nikon can get me a production model to test. In the meantime, check it out!
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