Nikon 1 – you want lip gloss to match that camera?

It’s the market, stupid. The fashion accessory market.

Now that the dust is settling, strange lumps and bumps in Nikon’s new system are revealed. The size of the lenses is an obvious one. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words:

I thought Nikon had opted for a smaller sensor so that this system would have smaller lenses. As we can see here, there’s not much in it when we compare it to the Oly E-PL3, and most of the lenses in this new system are bigger than the compact 10-30.

So we still have the same problem I’ve raised more than once: super compact bodies spoilt by lumpy lenses and accessories. There are no fast lenses here either, just big ones - the zooms start at f/3.5 to 4.5, and the 10mm prime is f/2.8 not 1.8. By the time you grab a couple of lenses and a flash, you’ll need a decent size carry bag.

You might as well get real and carry a small DSLR, but then this system isn’t about ‘real’. Not real photography anyway.

The Pricing is whacky too. $650 for the J1, $900 for the V1, both with the 10-30mm kit lens. Nikon says these cameras will bridge the gap between its Coolpix range and its consumer DSLRs. That rubbish. Not at those prices. A D5100 18-55 kit is less than $800, the same D3100 kit less than $600. Is Nikon going to raise the prices for its entry-level DSLRs?

The oddball sensor size is the next puzzle. It’s bad enough having to work with a 1.5 crop factor, but 2.7? The kit lens is 10-30mm, giving it a Field Of View of 27 – 81mm in 35mm equivalent terms, or 18-55mm in DX speak. If the lenses aren’t much smaller, why invent a new sensor size? Why not go with the M43 sensor, and the M43 lens mount? The M43 coalition has a lot to offer: http://www.four-thirds.org/en/microft/lense.html

There are currently 2 standards in EVIL cameras: Micro 43 (Panasonic and Olympus) and APS-C (Sony and Samsung). Why come up with a third one, and a proprietary one at that? I suspect when Canon jumps into this crowded fishpond, as it soon will, it’ll produce another oddball sensor.

In the PC world, we have Open systems. It means lots of choice with anything from motherboards to disk drives and screens. The M43 coalition is open in a modest kind of way: the lenses are interchangeable between Panasonic and Olympus bodies. Nikon could’ve opened up the M43 market, offering its customers more choice, and offering Nikon lenses to Panny and Oly users. A real opportunity missed.

F-mount adaptor

Needless to say, the Nikon 1 system is compatible with Nikon lenses, if nothing else, via the usual huge adaptor. That oddball sensor size throws a big spanner into the works. Just trying to convert DX lenses to the new FOV is giving me a headache. Here is the new body with adaptor and the 24-120 FX lens I think, which would end up giving an FOV of 120 – 320mm in 35mm terms. Would you actually want to do that?

Thom Hogan thinks there’s a market for it: ‘... you shoot for a sports Web site ... you never post anything bigger than 800 pixels. Now put an 85mm f/1.4G on the Nikon 1 and go to your next event. You're shooting two stops faster than the 70-200mm guy and 52 frames per second faster. Say what? Could that be useful? You bet it could be.’

The 85mm f/1.4 is a $1,000 lens, from memory, and here it would provides a FOV of 230mm. Is a sports shooter really going to be happy with that tiny sensor, and the handling limitations of these compact bodies? For over 2 grand? More likely he will buy the Sony a77 for about the same money as the awkward JV1/Nikon F-Mount adaptor/85mm f/1.4 combo.

Thom’s next market is soccer moms wanting to shoot their kids in sports action. ‘Let's see, they've got a 1080P TV, the Nikon 1 shoots 1080P stills at 60 fps, it's got reasonable low light credibility, stick some fast F-mount lenses on it and it suddenly becomes a camera you might be able to shoot from the stands with.’ Nikon guru Thom Hogan lives here http://bythom.com/ .

I don’t know what Thom’s been smoking - I suspect that most soccer mums or dads won’t want to shell out that much dough, or schlepp around that much gear – they’ll more likely settle for a pocket Casio EX-FH100 or FX100, which can shoot 40 frames per second at almost full resolution (9/10-megapixels), has decent video and HDR, anti-shake, low light mode and panorama, for $300. Their zoom lenses go from 24-300mm in the old film speak.

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/EXFH100/EXFH100A.HTM

http://www.ephotozine.com/article/casio-exilim-zr100-compact-zoom-review-16697

Other new stuff

The Nikon 1 has 600 megapixels per second internal throughput, faster than D3x. It takes photos / videos before and after you press the shutter. Motion snapshot (MSS) takes slow motion video and photo at the same time. Nikon call this the ‘Living picture’: It allows you to capture a second of movie footage and a still image each time the shutter is pressed. The Motion Snapshot is played back on the camera's LCD, with the video shown in slow motion over the course of 2.5 seconds, ending with the still image. Music themes can be chosen before or after Motion Snapshot capture.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Tells us a lot about the market too. Just the ticket for taking a quick video of you and your friends eating pizza and popping it on your Facebook page with a pop tune. Smart Photo Selector is another new trick: it takes 30 photos at 30fps at the full 10mp resolution. The camera filters the best 5 photos out of 30 shots. The Smart Photo Selector mode...allows you to choose the best one manually, or have the camera choose the best image for you, based on composition, focus, blur, face detection, smile and blink detection.

Video is clearly important in this market. The new sensor supports lots of video modes, such as 1080i/60, 1080P/30, and 720P/60. HD, of course. 60fps continuous shooting is also an option, at full resolution, for up to 12 shots with the J1, and 30 shots with the V1. The real news is that Nikon has built both phase and contrast detection into the sensor. There’s a short interview with a Nikon rep here: http://www.ephotozine.com/article/nikon-1-series-presentation-and-questions-with-nikon-17475 .

Summing up

Nikon is going for the consumer electronics market here, and all that stuff about bridging the gap between the Coolpix and DSLR ranges is rubbish. The main market for EVIL cameras is Japan, and it’s a fashion accessory market. Therefore the Paris Hilton colours. You want lip-gloss to match that camera?

Nikon threw in the V1 and some new tech to give the company’s more serious fans some meat to chew on. All of this OK, if Nikon wants a part of the EVIL market, but it begs the question once more: why not go with the M43 sensor? It’s a good size, good enough for decent image quality with a bit of Nikon finessing – Olympus and Panasonic have been a bit slack in this respect.

The answer is that the target audience probably doesn’t give a toss what’s inside these toys. Le chic is more important. Still, Nikon could’ve made itself a whole lot of new friends, and built an inviting bridge to a whole lot of new customers in Micro 4/3 land. In that sense, the Nikon 1 is a big opportunity missed.

Kim