Nikon Coolpix P80

In the past few weeks, we’ve taken a look at Canon’s, Fujifilm’s and Kodak’s new additions to their individual series of superzooms. It’s Nikon’s turn to show off their goods this time, with the Nikon Coolpix P80.

With the following dimensions: 110 x 79 x 78 mm, the P80 is neither too small, nor too big - it’s sized to fit your hand comfortably. The 405 gram weight of the camera is evenly distributed along the body, ensuring that it doesn’t feel lopsided or uncomfortable to wield in one hand.

The body comprises of a hard plastic shell, with a textured rubber grip on the well contoured grip side of the camera. What I absolutely loved was the little additional triangular rubber grip that’s placed on the upper-right corner of the facing side of the camera, that protrudes out to allow your right thumb to rest comfortably on it. All this factors into making the Nikon Coolpix P80 amazingly ergonomic.

The button placement is spot on too. The trigger’s placed conveniently towards the front of the top side of the camera, with a pretty large plastic ring around it that allows you to zoom in and out with ease. The power button and dial for switching between modes, are placed behind it. The upper right hand corner of the camera is coated with a small piece of gray plastic that adds aesthetic appeal to the otherwise black frame, and has a small navigation dial placed conveniently on it. The four way navigation pad’s placed below the dial, alongside the preview, menu and delete buttons. Besides these buttons, nests a 2.7 inch, 230,000 pixel screen.

By all that I’ve mentioned so far, you can easily deduce that the P80 boasts of solid build quality, and was designed with convenience and comfort in mind.

__PAGEBREAK__

The P80 comes equipped with a whopping 18x optical zoom lens, which can be used at full zoom even without a tripod thanks to the camera’s brilliant image stabilization. It allows for shots of up to 10 megapixel, which is great since it captures minute details really well even at full resolution.

The P80 supports Program, Shutter-priority, Aperture-priority, Scene and Manual modes, along side the new Sports-Continuous mode that allows you to take up to 30 continuous shots at a maximum speed of up to 13 frames per second. It’s auto white balance and color reproduction are spot on.

Its macro performance is brilliant, as it allows you to focus on objects closer than an inch and it doesn’t lose any of the details in the process.

The camera supports the following ISO settings 64, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 2000 at 10 MP, and 3200, 6400 at 3MP. It’s ISO performance wasn’t too good, and image quality started suffering quite a bit at ISO 400. In spite of this, it’s night mode performance was acceptable, but nothing to write home about.

The camera boasts of a really well designed, easy-to-use interface. This, coupled with the intuitively placed controls, makes the P80 incredibly user-friendly and a delightful companion to have around.

__PAGEBREAK__

With a pricetag of Rs.20,000 (street price), amazing build quality, and a strong backbone where features are concerned, the Nikon Coolpix P80 is undoubtedly worth a look for all those looking for a great consumer superzoom. The only detering factor is that the camera suffers a bit in low light conditions. If you can live with that, the P80 is worth it.

More from Reviews

Best phones under Rs 75,000 (March 2025): Apple iPhone 16, OnePlus 13 to Google Pixel 9 Apple iPhone 16e First Impressions: The budget gateway into Apple Intelligence

Technical Specifications