jancology.com

After being used to the Coolpix 5700 for a year now I found a number of things which could be much better. I won’t talk about a 20 mpix ccd which is free of noise, but about a number of smaller things which would make it a much better camera.

Hardware

• Manual focus ring (or focus-by-wire ring)
• Manual zoom ring instead of the electronic one
• Better focussing in low light conditions. I’m not sure if this is a hardware issue or if it could be solved in firmware only but it would definately be nice to have. Because of the bad focus in low contrast conditions, the focus feels a bit slow. I think the issue might partly be caused by the long zoom and camera vibration so we might wanna add vibration reduction also ;).
• Startup time; think its now five seconds, to spare batteries I have auto shutdown to 30 secs. Most of the time it happens after 29 seconds - just before it powers down - that I wanna take a new shot. It then has an anoying long time that you have to look at the black electronic view finder.
• Write time to flash should be within a second for RAW to make it usefull for action photography. Now its only possible to shoot still-lifes in RAW because of the 7 second write time.
• Bit less noise (for example in blue skies the noise is quite high especially when you darken the sky a bit)
• Vertical/horizontal direction detector so images don’t have to be rotated after download.
• Better build quality of the lens gears. It is now very vulnerable of hitting it and making the camera useless.

Firmware

• Be able to zoom in the evf/lcd to check if the focus is right before actually taking a photo or maybe have an option to show ‘real’ pixels 1:1.
• Make the quick button really quick and ignore the small thumbnail in the top left corner but immediately show the full size picture.
• Make it possible to adjust the flash power with the +/- button (may be in combination with pressing a second button like the flash button on the lens) . It now takes half a minute to adjust its power. On a relatively cheap F80 type camera, it is done in a second!
• Support the external focus assist light on speed lights (and other DX-type functions)