Nikon Coolpix 8700Nikon moves into 8 megapixel territory with a long zoom, and a new body, but the same legendary Nikon feature set!<<Design :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 4:ViewfinderReview First Posted: 03/22/2004 |
A
feature in the 8700 that came in with the Coolpix 5700 is the electronic viewfinder
(EVF), essentially a miniaturized version of the LCD monitor, complete with information
and menu screens, but sheltered from the sun in a more traditional viewfinder
with an "optical viewfinder" feel. The Monitor Select button on the
right side of the viewfinder switches the view back and forth between the EVF
and LCD monitor displays. Though you can call up the LCD menus in the EVF display,
I found it rather tedious to actually make menu selections that way. It's much
easier to use the larger display of the LCD monitor for menu navigation. Still,
the EVF's informative display reports exposure settings, camera mode settings,
and battery information, all of which are useful during normal operation. The
EVF comes in handy when shooting outside in extremely bright sunlight that washes
out the LCD (although the 8700's LCD is much better in this respect than those
on most digicams), or when nearby reflections just make viewing an otherwise good
outdoor LCD uncomfortable. A diopter adjustment dial, tucked on the left side
of the eyepiece, adjusts the view to accommodate eyeglass wearers, and the micro-LCD
used in the 8700's EVF has higher than average resolution, with 235,000 pixels
(101,000 more than the rear-panel LCD display). Through the Setup menu, you can
specify whether the EVF or LCD monitor automatically activates by default at camera
startup.
The 1.8-inch, 134,000-dot, low-temperature polysilicon TFT LCD monitor features a swivel design, plus brightness and hue adjustment. The LCD monitor actually lifts up off of the back panel, flipping out toward the left side of the camera. Once opened, the LCD monitor can swivel around to face up or down over about a 270 degree range of rotation. You can also turn the LCD monitor around to face the camera and then close it to protect the monitor from any accidental scratches. I really like swiveling LCD designs, as they greatly increase the camera's shooting flexibility, allowing you to hold the camera at a variety of angles and still clearly see the LCD display. (They're particularly handy for over-the-head shots in crowds, or for ground-level macro shooting.)
A nice touch in the Coolpix 8700's LCD viewfinder implementation is that you
can adjust not only the viewfinder brightness, but its color (hue) as well.
A menu option lets you adjust the viewfinder color towards either the blue
or the red ends of the spectrum, to help match the viewfinder display to
the actual color balance of your captured images. I applaud this, but note
that having control only over blue/red tints is only a partial solution.
(Technically, you need separate controls for red, green, and blue, in order
to be able to completely control the display color. You could get away with
only varying two of these relative to the third, but I suspect that full
control would result in a bewildering user interface. Still, I'd like to
see some attempt to offer more complete color adjustment. Big kudos to Nikon
for providing any sort of LCD hue adjustment though.)
The Coolpix 8700
again features Nikon's powerful zone-based autofocus system. The camera automatically
chooses between five different autofocus zones, or you can lock it in on
any one of them manually. Either way, the viewfinder displays all five zones,
and highlights the currently active one in red.
Beyond the
zone-based AF indication though, the Coolpix 8700's viewfinder offers a number
of display options in capture mode. Pressing the DISP button cycles through
the various options, which include a basic display showing only the AF zones,
a display that includes information on a fair number of camera settings,
a display with a live histogram graph overlaid on the image, and a new mode
that adds a rectangular/diagonal alignment grid. (I really like alignment
grids like this for scenes with prominent horizontal or vertical elements,
but did feel that the grid lines on the 8700's screen were a little too coarse
for my tastes. Finer lines would still give you good alignment references,
without obscuring as much of the subject.)
A Quick
Review function lets you quickly check the last exposure while still in record
mode, simply by pressing the Quick Review button above the LCD screen. This
isn't an uncommon feature on digicams, but what's absolutely unique on the
Coolpix cameras is the "picture in picture" review mode (shown
here), which opens a playback window in the upper left-hand corner of the
display screen, while keeping the viewfinder image live on the remaining
LCD area. Note too, that this image isn't restricted to the most recently
captured photo. You can scroll through all the images on the memory card
by pressing the rocker button arrows. The first press of the Quick Review
button activates the picture in picture review mode, a second press enables
full-screen playback, and a third press returns you to full capture mode.
At any point, pressing the Shutter button returns you to capture mode and
snaps a picture. (The shot above is "borrowed" from my review of
the Coolpix 5700, the Quick Review function works the same way on the 8700.)
In Playback
mode, the LCD offers a wealth of information via several display pages. In
total, no fewer than five information screens are available, accessed by
turning the Command dial in playback mode. The first display is the standard
Playback information readout, which reports the date and time of the shot,
file name, quality setting, and the image number on the card. The next two
screens report a long listing of camera and exposure settings, including
the firmware version, focal length, shutter speed, ISO, etc. A fourth information
page shows a histogram view of the image, illustrating the distribution of
brightness values in the image, with the left edge corresponding to pure
black, and the right edge to pure white. Once you learn how to read it, a
histogram is very useful in determining whether you've managed to capture
a good exposure or not. Ideally, a well-exposed image would produce a histogram
curve that just filled the graph from left to right, indicating that it contained
a full range of tonal values. The final information screen shows lens, shutter,
and focus settings, and indicates (by the red brackets) what the autofocus
system had locked onto when the picture was taken. Histogram displays won't
always show you if only a small portion of your image is blown-out: To address
this need, the 8700 blinks those parts of the image that are overexposed,
letting you see exactly where you're losing highlight detail. Very
nice. (Although I've generally found the 8700's blinking highlights a little
too aggressive in what they choose to warn you about.)
Also in Playback
mode, the LCD offers a thumbnail index display, showing either four or nine
images to a page depending on the setting. The Zoom Rocker button controls
the index display, as the wide-angle side of the zoom lever increases the
number of thumbnails displayed (from one to four to nine). The telephoto
side returns to the single image display, and also activates the playback
zoom, which enlarges the displayed image up to 6x in 25 steps. When you're
zoomed in on an image, you can pan around the image with the rocker control.
Pressing the shutter also captures a cropped image of the current LCD display
and saves it as a new file. You can then zoom in on the cropped image even
further. An unexpected plus.
Why I don't like EVFs
I guess this is where I need to express my concerns over EVFs in general,
and the one on the 8700 as a particular example of the issues. When it comes
to cameras with long-ratio zoom lenses, EVFs prove to be a necessary evil.
There's just no way to manufacture an optical viewfinder with a long zoom
ratio that'll accurately track the field of view of the lens and have acceptable
optical characteristics (brightness, distortion, etc) for an affordable price.
As a result, once you get over about a 5x zoom ratio, you pretty much have
to go with an EVF.
So what's wrong with an EVF, and why do I call it a "necessary evil?" The problem really comes down to light sensitivity. In order to provide a "live" display, the LCD inside the EVF has to be refreshed quite rapidly, certainly no less than 5 times per second or so. This places a severe limit on the amount of light the CCD can gather for each refresh. (If the refresh rate were 5 times per second, the maximum shutter time for each frame would obviously be about 1/5 of a second.) While you can generally tolerate a darker image in the viewfinder than you'd accept in the final photograph, the fact remains that EVF-equipped cameras can almost always capture acceptable photos under much lower light levels than those at which you can actually see anything through the viewfinder. There are tricks the camera engineers can play to help this situation somewhat, but they're limited. Slowing refresh rates in dim lighting is the first trick to use, and that's what the Nikon designers did with the 8700. The 8700's refresh rate gets much slower in dim lighting conditions. Another trick is to crank up the signal amplification between the CCD and LCD, to get a brighter image. You'll get more image noise on the LCD, but most users will accept pretty noisy EVF images if the increased noise at least lets them see their subjects. Nikon appears to have adopted this latter practice as well, but only to a degree.
In playing with the 8700's EVF, I found that it responded pretty directly to the camera's ISO setting: Higher ISOs produced brighter EVF displays under darker conditions. I discovered though, that changes in EVF sensitivity lagged changes in the ISO setting by a few seconds. The viewfinder display was at least somewhat usable down to surprisingly low light levels with the ISO set to 400, but it took a good 6-10 seconds for the display to brighten after changing from a lower ISO setting. If want to shoot at lower ISO settings to minimize image noise (and are patient enough), it's possible to set the ISO up to 400 to frame your shot, then dial it back down to whatever value you want to shoot at. This is feasible, but far from convenient. (Here's a suggestion to the Nikon engineers: How about a firmware option that would boost the effective ISO dramatically only for the viewfinder display? A menu option could turn this on or off, preserving the relationship between viewfinder brightness and ultimate exposure level for normal shooting.) Overall, the EVF in the 8700 does a somewhat better than average job of letting you see under dim lighting, but it's still no match for a true optical viewfinder when it comes to low light shooting.
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