Access

We again went for a walk last July 28, and I was consciously looking for different views of the village.

This ramp's a relatively new addition to this home, which is across the street and a few houses down from ours.

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I'd been planning to review the Nikon 1 V1 on my blog in late July or early August, last summer, but distractions caused me to put it off. By the time I'd found the energy to write the review the V2'd been announced, so the review didn't seem worth my effort.

Nonetheless, here's a mini review:

Let's start with a hint: Turn the Display OFF. Doing so makes the Electronic View Finder faster.

First off, I like the camera. It's been my primary camera for over a year, something that wouldn't happen with an unusable camera. I like the small package, and for my purposes the camera performs well, though it's quite quirky. My D300's a far better camera in nearly all ways, but for most of my purposes the V1's good enough.

The camera's strengths, besides the small package, are its extremely fast autofocus (in good light) and its color rendering. In excellent conditions, the V1 takes excellent photographs. In poorer conditions, the V1 takes adequate to very good photographs. That's what you should expect of this system from its specs.

The camera's weaknesses, besides the small sensor, are mostly software design issues; this is an unusually quirky camera. (As I noted on July 18, burying the ISO and White Balance controls in the menu is pretty annoying. The manual focus setup's even worse.) In my usual manual-exposure-with-autofocus setup, changing the F-stop can be done quickly but large adjustments to the shutter speed take far too much time; I suspect this is backwards from what most photographers need. (Most of these complaints have apparently been addressed in the V2.)

The Electronic View Finder's a mixed bag. The camera forces you to review the last image, which is mostly annoying but occasionally useful. And the EVF's resolution leaves a bit to be desired; you're only seeing an approximation of the actual image. On the other hand the EVF gives you some hints about what the photo's going to look like that you don't get from a conventional view finder.

The 10-30 mm kit lens--equivalent to a 27-81 mm lens on a full frame (D)SLR--seems very good. It's a tiny thing, and I'm pretty sure the low mass of the small lens is one of the elements of the system's excellent high-speed autofocus. I'm happy with it, and it's the lens that's normally on this camera.

The small sensor, and the small lenses the sensor makes possible, are the key to the Nikon 1 cameras. If you can live with the limitations those put on the rest of the design, the V1 is a viable camera. For some photographers it's a viable primary camera.

Earlier in the month I discussed my setup preferences for this camera.

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Oh, yes; the dogs (see below). The frisky fellows live around the midpoint of our usual route through the town.

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This photograph is an outtake from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps.

Number of project photos taken: 18
Title of "roll:" Around Mulliken
Other photos taken on 7/28/2012: For the first time in a couple weeks I managed a Daily Flower Census.