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Nikon Coolpix 8400 By: Shawn Barnett & Dave Etchells (none) Select a topic Reference: Datasheet 8400 Sample Images 8400 Imatest Results --------------------------------- 1. Intro and Highlights 2. User Report 3. Design 4. Viewfinder 5. Optics 6. Exposure & Flash 7. Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests 8. Operation & User Interface 9. Camera Modes & Menus 10. Image Storage & Interface 11. Video, Power, Software 12. Test Results & Conclusion --------------------------------- Print-Friendly Review Version Additional Resources and Other Links Reader Comments on 8400 Review --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index <<Video, Power, Software :(Previous) | (Next): Reference: Datasheet>> Page 12:Test Results & Conclusion Review First Posted: 09/16/2004, Updated: 12/13/2004

In keeping with my standard test policy, the comments given here summarize only my key findings. For a full commentary on each of the test images, see the Nikon Coolpix 8400's "pictures" page.

As with all Imaging Resource product tests, I encourage you to let your own eyes be the judge of how well the camera performed. Explore the images on the Coolpix 8400 pictures page for the, to see how the Nikon 8400's images compare to other cameras you may be considering.

• Color: Bright, saturated color, but good hue accuracy. (Color was virtually identical to that of the 8800, so my comments here mirror those for the 8800.) The Nikon Coolpix 8400 tends to emphasize bright colors, boosting both saturation and brightness in the most intense colors in a scene. Fortunately, it reigns in the saturation on less-saturated colors, so skin tones look natural. (Its color saturation adjustment works well. Users who prefer less saturated, more technically accurate color may find themselves quite happy with the Nikon 8400, if they dial down the saturation one notch.) White balance was generally quite good: While I often noticed very slight color casts with each white balance setting, they were within the range of what I'd consider acceptable. Skin tones were pretty good in the "Sunlit" Portrait, as was color in the flower bouquet. The blue flowers were slightly dark and purplish, but still good overall. Indoors, the Nikon 8400 handled the difficult incandescent lighting of the Indoor Portrait test unusually well. (Big kudos to Nikon on this score - very few digicams do a good job with household incandescent lighting.) Overall, quite good-looking color, and the saturation control offers a good option for purists preferring less saturation.
  
  
• Exposure: Generally good exposure, but high contrast, and a tendency to underexpose subjects with strong highlights. (Exposure performance was also very similar to that of the 8800.) Exposure was typically good, though the Coolpix 8400 underexposed the "Sunlit" Portrait a fair amount, requiring a +1.3 EV exposure compensation boost to get good midtones. Like the 8800, when confronted with a scene with strong highlights, the Nikon 8400 tries to hold onto highlight detail, at the cost of an overall underexposure. This is a technically correct and desirable characteristic in a camera if the shooter intends to tweak the images on the computer before printing or sharing them. For casual shooters though, it will mean a lot of underexposed shots, or the need to become very familiar with the exposure compensation adjustment. (Not a bad idea anyway, just keep in mind that the Coolpix 8400 isn't a "casual" camera.) The 8400's default tone curve was also quite contrasty, so it had a hard time with harsh lighting such as that found in my deliberately-awful "Sunlit Portrait" test. Its contrast adjustment works better than that on other recent high-end Coolpix models I've tested in the past, but it could really stand at least one more notch of range in the low-contrast direction. Bottom line: A camera that'll deliver excellent photos, but one that requires a bit more attention to exposure than most.
  
  
• Resolution/Sharpness: High resolution, 1,650 lines of "strong detail." The Nikon Coolpix 8400 performed very well on the "laboratory" resolution test chart. It started showing artifacts in the test patterns at resolutions as low as 1,200 lines per picture height vertically and horizontally. I found "strong detail" out to at least 1,650 lines. (Compared to the Coolpix 8800, its images were just slightly less crisp, but there were fewer artifacts in the very fine detail. Overall performance was pretty equivalent though.) "Extinction" of the target patterns didn't occur until about 2,000 lines. Looking at the results from Imatest, the "MTF 50" numbers tend to correlate best with visual perceptions of sharpness, so those are what I focus on here. The uncorrected resolution figures for the Coolpix 8400 were 1380 line widths per picture height in the horizontal direction (corresponding to the vertically-oriented edge), and 1391 along the vertical axis (corresponding to the horizontally-oriented edge), for a combined average of 1386 LW/PH. Correcting to a "standardized" sharpening with a one-pixel radius increases this number slightly, to an average of 1519 LW/PH, a very good number. (This is very slightly lower resolution than I found with the Coolpix 8800, which came in at a corrected average of 1559 LW/PH.)
  
  
• Image Noise: Low noise at low ISOs, with good "grain structure," high at ISO 200, objectionable at ISO 400. (Another case where the 8400 was essentially identical to the 8800.) Image noise on the 8800 was interesting: At the ISO 50 and 100 settings, image noise was visible but quite tolerable, particularly at ISO 50, where what noise there was, was very fine-grained. At ISO 200, details were slightly obscured by the anti-noise processing, the noise levels were higher, and the noise was less fine-grained, but still within a range that I think most users would consider acceptable. At ISO 400, the noise was much stronger, more subject detail was lost, and the noise pattern became much coarser, although it was still tighter than that in many cameras. I personally wouldn't consider the Coolpix 8400 to be usable at ISO 400 for large prints, but it would be fine for 4x6 snapshots.
  
  
• Closeups: A very small macro area with great detail, though some strong softening in the corners. Flash has trouble up close though. True to Nikon form, the Coolpix 8400 performed very well in the macro category, capturing a minimum area of only 1.83 x 1.37 inches (46 x 35 millimeters). Resolution was very high, showing a lot of fine detail in the dollar bill. Details were quite soft on the coins and brooch due to the close shooting range, as well as some softening of detail in the corners of the frame. (The soft brooch and coins are due to the shallow depth of field at macro distances, so aren't the camera's fault. On the other hand, the soft corners are, but most digicams produce images with soft corners when shooting in their Macro modes.) The Coolpix 8400's flash had trouble at such close range, overexposing the majority of the frame. (A good idea to have alternative lighting for macro shooting with this camera.)
  
  
• Night Shots: Good to moderate low-light performance. Good exposure and moderate image noise, but slight color tints. Very good low-light autofocus performance, IF you have the camera on a tripod and have a nice contrasty subject. The Nikon Coolpix 8400 produced clear, bright, usable images down to the 1/16 foot-candle (0.67 lux) limit of my test, only at the 400 ISO setting. At ISOs 50 and 100, images were bright down to the 1/4 foot-candle (2.7 lux) light level. At ISO 200, images were bright down to the 1/8 foot-candle (1.3 lux) light level, though the target was visible at the lowest light level of the test. Overall color was slightly warm, but still pretty good. Noise was fairly low in most shots. At ISO 400, image noise was fairly high, but the camera's Noise Reduction system did do a fair job of decreasing its effects. Without Noise Reduction enabled, the bright pixels reddened the color balance. Noise level remained high with Noise Reduction, but the overall image still looked a little better. The Nikon 8400's autofocus system worked very well in dim lighting, focusing without its AF-assist light down to about 1/8 foot-candle, and in complete darkness with the AF-assist light enabled. NOTE though, that the camera struggled a fair bit with low-contrast subjects, and often had a very hard time focusing if hand-held vs tripod-mounted. Since average city street lighting at night equates to about one foot-candle, the Coolpix 8400 ought to do very well in average night conditions, provided you can give it a reasonably high-contrast edge to focus on.
  
  
• Viewfinder Accuracy: Good accuracy from the EVF and LCD monitor. The Coolpix 8400's "electronic" optical viewfinder (EVF) was fairly accurate, showing about 95 percent of the final image area at wide angle. At telephoto, the top measurement line was just cut off, but frame accuracy is probably close to that of wide angle. The LCD produced similar results, since it's really just the same view on a larger screen. Given that I like LCD monitors to be as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the Coolpix 8400's LCD monitor has just a little room for improvement, but should be plenty accurate for typical shooting.
  
  
• Optical Distortion: High barrel distortion at wide angle. Moderate to low chromatic aberration, good sharpness in the corners. Geometric distortion on the Coolpix 8400 was quite high at the wide-angle end, where I measured approximately 1.01 percent barrel distortion. (Perhaps somewhat to be excused due to its excellent wide angle capability.) The telephoto end fared quite a bit better, as I measured approximately 0.01 percent barrel distortion (about two pixels' worth) there. Chromatic aberration was moderate at wide angle settings (better than average, I'd say, given the very wide angle capability of the 8400), and very low at telephoto focal lengths. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.) The 8400's lens also did a much better job than most at maintaining sharpness into the corners of the frame.
  
  
• Good shutter response, average cycle times, but slow writes to the memory card. While its cycle times are merely average, the Coolpix 8400's best-case shutter lag numbers of 0.39 - 0.41 second are quite impressive, no doubt thanks in part to its hybrid IR/Contrast Detection AF system. It's important to note though, that the best shutter response comes when the camera's Hybrid AF system is engaged, an option that's only available when the camera's multi-area AF system is disabled. Shutter response is quite good even in multi-area AF mode though, at 0.54 - 0.56 second. Oddly though, shutter response suffered significantly whenever we shot while the camera was still writing previous images to the memory card. Under that condition, shutter lag was 1.15 second with reasonably fast memory cards (4x or better), but stretched to 2.3 seconds with a very slow card we had on hand. As noted, the Coolpix 8400's shot to shot cycle time of 2.7 - 3.3 seconds is a little slow by current standards, but its performance in its various Continuous modes is quite good. In Continuous High mode, the camera captures up to 5 shots at a rate of 2.3 frames/second. In Continuous Low mode, the camera captures a variable number of images depending on the image size/quality selected, at a rate of 1.1 frames/second. NOTE though, that Continuous Low mode can yield corrupted images if you're shooting at high ISOs in Large/Extra Fine mode. For the real speed fanatics, Ultra High Speed continuous mode can capture up to 100 TV-sized (640x480) images at a rate of 30 frames/second. Overall, the biggest speed issue with the Nikon 8400 is that it's rather slow writing to its memory card, and doesn't benefit much from very fast memory cards. Buffer clearing times for JPEG files captured in single-shot mode are long but reasonable, in the range of 15-20 seconds. RAW-mode files clear much more slowly (42 seconds), and long series of shots captured in continuous mode can take 100 seconds or more to fully clear the buffer.
  
  
• Battery Life: Excellent battery life. The Coolpix 8400 unfortunately uses a custom power connector, so I wasn't able to perform my usual direct power measurements on it. In use, its battery did seem to last quite a long while though, and I measured its worst case run time (capture mode, with the rear-panel LCD illuminated) at 2 hours and 56 minutes (176 minutes total), a very good performance indeed, and a dramatic improvement over the battery life of the earlier 8700 model.

 

Conclusion

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Now that we've had a chance to fully test a final production model, our earlier impressions of the Nikon Coolpix 8400 have been pretty well borne out. Image quality was generally excellent, with loads of resolution, in-camera sharpening that struck a good balance between perceived sharpness and minimal artifacts, good (if somewhat bright) color, and a lens that kept chromatic aberration largely in check yet maintained good sharpness in the corners of the frame. The two standout features of the Nikon 8400 are its fast shutter response (among the best we've seen in a prosumer camera), and its super-wide 24-85mm equivalent zoom lens. A Nikkor add-on wide-angle adapter pushes the wide end of the lens's range to an incredible 18mm, unheard of in prosumer digicams, other than "fisheye" adapters. If you need to shoot at wide angle, the Nikon 8400 will be a no-brainer decision. (For Realtors, this is the camera to get.) Likewise, if fast-breaking action is important, the 8400 has the speed to capture it.