Nikon COOLPIX P330 12.2 MP Digital Camera - Black

I have always loved small elegant easily pocketable cameras and over the years I’ve owned, used, and reviewed dozens.  I have been a photographer for most of my adult life and I’ve been reviewing cameras for almost twenty years.  I’ve managed to meet a bunch of people in the digital imaging industry and when one of them contacted me last month and asked if I’d like to review the diminutive new Nikon Coolpix P330, I agreed immediately.  I’d just finished reviewing (for another website) Canon’s nifty little S110 and the idea of getting to spend a week playing with the camera Nikon had specifically designed to compete with the S110 made my day. 
 
NUTS & BOLTS
The highly capable little Canon S110 is the latest version of the resurrected “S” series (S90. S95, S100) while the equally impressive P330 is Nikon’s third generation “S” clone.  Like its predecessor  (P310) the P330 features an f1.8 maximum aperture (the fastest in the Coolpix model catalog), the latest EXPEED image processing engine, COOLPIX Picture Control functions, 1080p HD video recording (with stereo audio and the ability to utilize the zoom during video capture), and a lens-shift vibration reduction (VR) system which provides camera shake compensation equivalent to a four-step increase in shutter speed.   What’s new?  Resolution is now 12 megapixels recorded to the much larger BSI-CMOS 1/1.7” sensor from the upscale P7700 (the P310 used the much smaller and much higher noise generating 16 megapixel 1/2.3" CMOS sensor from the P510), a new zoom that adds twenty mm’s on the long end, RAW capture, a new GPS system, and WiFi connectivity (with the optional WU-1a Wi-Fi unit). 

Viewfinder/LCD/Display
Like most currently available P&S digicams, the P330 does not feature an opical viewfinder.  Users must rely instead on the LCD monitor for all framing/composition, GPS data, captured image review and menu navigation chores. Most modern shooters rarely use optical viewfinders anyway and in many shooting scenarios (macro shots and portraits for example) it is actually quicker and easier to watch the decisive moment come together on the LCD screen than it is through an optical (or EVF) viewfinder. 
 
The wide-viewing angle 3.0 inch TFT LCD (921K resolution) is super sharp, very bright, hue accurate, and fluid and the info display provides all the information this camera's target audience is likely to need.  The LCD gains up (automatically increases brightness) in dim lighting and brightness can also be adjusted to the individual shooter’s preferences. The anti-glare/anti-reflection coating (applied to both sides of the LCD’s protective cover) is substantially better than the average for digicams in this class. 
 
Zoom Lens
The P330’s predecessor featured a 4.2X zoom with a super fast f/1.8 maximum aperture.  The P330 retains the very fast f1.8 maximum aperture and 24mm start point of the P310 zoom and adds 20mm to the telephoto end of the range to create a 5x  f1.8-f5.6/24mm-120mm (equivalent) zoom.  Most P&S digicams offer zooms with maximum apertures of between f/2.8 and f3.5, so the P330's f/1.8 maximum aperture lets in more than twice as much light as an f2.8 aperture and almost four times as much light as an f3.5 aperture, which allows for faster shutter speeds in low/dim light.   
 
The P330’s super-stabilized moderate wide-angle to short telephoto zoom covers the focal length range most often used by “Straight Shooters” who usually tend to work in pretty close.  When the P310 is powered up the zoom extends from the camera body automatically, and when the camera is powered down, the lens retracts and a built in iris-style lens cover closes to protect the front element. Zooming is fairly smooth and lens operation is relatively quiet. The P330 needs between 2 and 3 seconds to move the lens from the wide-angle end of the zoom range to the maximum telephoto setting.

The P330's zoom is surprisingly good and even though the lens displays some minimal light fall-off and very minor corner softness, there's no vignetting (dark corners). Chromatic aberration (purple fringing) is visible in some high contrast shots, especially when shooting dark objects against a bright background, but overall – CA is very well controlled. Barrel distortion (at the wide-angle end of the zoom range) is present, but very well corrected and that’s impressive optical engineering since well above average barrel distortion is a common fault with small highly complex P&S digicam zooms.   Now for the bad news – the P330 is very fast at the wide-angle end of that 5x zoom, but not nearly as fast at the telephoto end.  An f5.6 maximum aperture at 120mm is too slow for shooting much indoors, but it should work fine (at least in decent light) outdoors.

Image Stabilization (IS) 
Consistently capturing sharply focused pictures with a P&S camera offers some unique optical engineering challenges.  The P330 optical image stabilization system reduces blur by rapidly and precisely shifting a lens element in the zoom to compensate for involuntary camera movement. Typically, Image Stabilization systems allow users to shoot at shutter speeds up to three EV slower than would have been possible without Image stabilization.  Nikon claims the P310 can counter involuntary camera shake (like that caused by trying to keep a zoom locked on a distant subject) in seven ways including Hybrid VR (Optical lens-shift Vibration Reduction and Digital/Electronic IS combine to reduce the effects of camera shake), High Sensitivity (up to ISO 3200) reduces the risk of blurred images with faster shutter speeds, Motion detection compensates for subject movement, Night Landscape mode, and backlight mode also decrease image blur by improving low light performance. 

Auto Focus (AF)
The P330 features the same TTL (through the lens) Contrast Detection AF system as its predecessor with three AF modes - single, continuous, and face detection AF and four focus options -  Multi-area AF, Center AF, and Tracking AF, plus manual focus.  In all exposure modes, the camera analyzes the scene in front of the lens and then calculates camera to subject distance to determine which AF point is closest to the primary subject (closest subject priority) and then locks focus on that AF point, or users can opt for single AF point Auto Focus and shift that single AF point to any spot in the composition. AF is very quick and consistently accurate. 

GPS
Geo-tagging has been growing in popularity with shutterbugs, as they seek unique new ways to share their images.  For travelers who visit world capitals the P330’sGPSsystem will locate the user precisely and then display a map with the quickest routes to major tourist attractions in those cities.  The P330’s GPS system won't work indoors and it is often slow to find and lock onto a satellite signal outdoors, but it is easily competive with the similarly handicapped digicam GPS systems from Canon.

Flash 
The P330's diminutive multi-mode pop-up flash provides a basic selection of artificial lighting options, including Auto, On, Off, Red-Eye Reduction, and Slow-sync.  Based on my very limited flash use, the P330's flash recycle time is between 3 and 4 seconds. 
 
Memory Media
The Nikon Coolpix P330 saves images and video to SD, SDHC, and SDXC memory media. 

Power 
The P310 was good for 230 exposures on it’s proprietary Nikon EN-EL12 Lithium-Ion battery, however the P330 (with the same battery) is only good for 200 exposures.  The P330’s Lithium Ion battery is charged in-camera via its USB AC adapter - the battery can also be charged via the computer’s USB port.

EXPOSURE
 
Metering
The P330 (like its predecessor) provides users with four light metering options including the default Evaluative mode, Center-weighted averaging mode, Spot mode, and a Spot AF metering (center-spot or shiftable spot).  Default evaluative metering is dependably accurate in all but the most extreme lighting situations.  Metering accuracy in the Center-Weighted Averaging and Spot modes is primarily dependent on the skill level of the photographer. 
  
DESIGN, BUILD QUALITY, CONTROLS & ERGONOMICS
At first glance, the P330 bears an uncanny resemblance to its predecessor - Nikon didn’t deviate much from the original design with this unit.  The P330 may look like a typical compact P&S digicam since it is easily pocketable and will function nicely in Auto (P&S) mode, but unlike the flood of auto-exposure only P&S digicams currently inundating the marketplace - the P330 is an enthusiast’s camera that permits lots of personal input into the image making process. The P330 feels solid and stable in your hands, features a robustly constructed all metal body with first-rate dust/moisture seals, and allows full manual control of exposure.

The P330 features a classicly elegant minimalist design and will function nicely as a general purpose camera, but its strongest appeal may be that it is an almost perfect camera for either candid/street photography or urban travel photography.    The P330 is small and non-threatening to subjects, it is a very capable picture maker, it is easy to use, it responds almost intuitively to the photographer, and it is fast enough to capture the decisive moment - making it almost perfect for reactive photography.

The P330's user interface is logical and uncomplicated - all buttons and controls are a bit small, but they are all clearly marked, sensibly placed and easily accessed.  The control layout is efficiently designed, but the on/off button is so small that it usually requires a couple of attempts to turn the camera on or off – however this isn’t unique to the P330 – every Nikon I’ve used recently suffers from this minor design fault. 

Nikon’s function button is not like Canon’s nifty “func” button (which calls up a shortcut menu to directly access often changed settings), rather the Nikon Fn button provides direct access to one (image size, picture control, WB, metering, continuous shooting mode, ISO, or AF area) user selected function - I used the function button for direct access to the nifty CPC function.   The P330 features two control dials. The dial on the top deck controls shutter speed and the dial on the on the back of the camera controls aperture.  Both dials fall easily under the thumb and index finger of the right hand, but their functions can be swapped.

I only got to keep the P330 for a week, but I enjoyed carrying this snazzy little camera around and I really hated to send it back.   Most P&S digicams permit only limited user input into the exposure process while the P330 actually expands user input options, but Nikon still hasn’t fixed one of their most frustrating design miscues. The exposure compensation function is meant to allow savvy shooters to subtly modify exposure by incrementally lightening or darkening images.  If you activate the Exposure Compensation function on any of the Nikon P&S digicams I’ve reviewed recently, the camera will remember your settings – even after it is turned off.  The P310’s info display shows the exposure compensation setting (briefly) when the camera is turned on, however it is very easy to miss that bit of information and accidentally shoot images that are lighter or darker than the existing lighting calls for. There is no logical reason why a camera should be designed to remember an exposure compensation setting that was only relevant to a specific past lighting situation. 

 Menus and Modes  
The P330's menu system is reliably logical, user-friendly, and easily navigated. The large high resolution LCD and reasonable font size make reading menus simple, even for older folks and those who wear eyeglasses.

Here's a breakdown of the shooting modes:

Auto: Point-and-shoot mode with limited user input - In Auto mode (which is actually closer to Program mode) the camera selects the aperture and shutter speed, but allows users to control sensitivity (ISO), white balance, color/saturation, and exposure compensation. Scene Auto Selector (automatically selects the most appropriate Scene mode for the shooting situation) from Portrait, Landscape, Night Portrait, Party/Indoor, Beach/Snow, Sunset, Dusk/Dawn, Night Landscape, Close-Up, Food, Museum, Fireworks Show, Copy, Backlight, and Panorama Assist. Night Landscape Scene Mode: Automatically selects a smaller aperture (to increase the area in focus) and a longer shutter speed (to help capture detail) in dim/low lighting conditions. Landscape Scene Mode: All exposure parameters are maximized for classic landscape pictures. Backlighting: Automatically adjusts exposure parameters (HDR) to balance backlighting and ambient lighting for more accurate exposures. Effects: Soft-focus mode, Sepia, High contrast monochrome, High key, Low key, Selective color, and Painting. User Settings: Custom Program: Auto exposure with limited user input.  Aperture priority: Users select the aperture and the camera selects an appropriate shutter speed.  Shutter priority: Users select shutter speed and the camera selects an appropriate aperture.  Manual: Users select all exposure parameters. Movie: Full HD (1080p at 30fps) video with stereo audio.
 
There is no dedicated movie/video setting on the mode dial – simply press the P330’s one touch movie start/stop button at any time (in any exposure mode) to switch to video capture mode. 
 
In the Field/Handling & Operation
I live in the Ohio River Valley and like most local photographers benefit greatly from living in North Central Kentucky.  Three seasons of the year are absolutely beautiful here.  We have a lovely spring (usually beginning in early March) with lots of flowering trees like Dogwood, Bradford Pear, and Redbud.  During our hot and humid summers we host a stunning collection of wildflowers including Appalachian varieties like Lady’s Slipper, Trout Lilly and Dog’s Tooth Violet.  We also have prairie species like Giant Purple Cone Flowers and Black-eyed Susans, and deep-south exotics like Passion Flowers and Dwarf Iris.  Kentucky is where the Southern (pine, Hemlock, and softwood) forests meet the Northern (hardwood and Fir) forests, so we have a very impressive Autumn color season that draws leaf peepers from as far away as Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinatti.  During the winter North Central Kentucky is remarkably ugly.  We get, mostly, gray skies, lots of rain, and many cold windy days.  We get very little snow so we don’t have much opportunity to do winter wonderland shots, but overall Louisville is very photographer friendly.  We have lots of green space, dozens of neighborhood festivals, the best preserved collection of Cast-Iron facade buildings in the world, Old Louisville (a huge neighborhood filled with a collection of Victorian Mansions that rivals New Orlean’s Garden District), and Cave Hill Cemetery - an almost two hundred year old urban graveyard that is the final resting place for Revolutionary War Veterans, Civil War Veterans (from both sides), and many of Kentucky’s most prominent historical figures including Louisville’s founder George Rogers Clark and fried chicken icon Colonel Harland Sanders.  

My first outing with the P330 took me to Cave Hill Cemetery.  Cave Hill became Louisville's first urban cemetery in the mid 1830's. Cave Hill is filled with thousands of weather worn old headstones, dozens of ornate mausoleums, a rustic old groundskeeper’s cabin, and a small lake with flocks of semi-tame ducks, Canada geese, and swans. Cave Hill is also our unofficial local arboretum and one of the best remaining examples of 19th century landscape architecture in the U.S and this old cemetery’s 300 acres are home to an amazing variety of exotic and native trees, shrubs, and bushes – making it an almost perfect photo venue for local shooters because it is free, centrally located, and there is almost always something interesting to photograph.
 
My next trip with P310 was to Bardstown Road, in the heart of Louisville's old Highlands neighborhood. During the '60s and '70s, Bardstown Road was the epicenter of our local counterculture. Times have changed, but here and there a bit of the old Hippie Days Bardstown Road survives. Street shooters have a two-mile collection of laid back bars, unique restaurants, one of a kind stores, and funky resale shops. The sidewalks are busy with shoppers, hang out artists, an occasional skateboarder, buskers (with varying degrees of musical competence), panhandlers, and street people.  The nifty little P330 was perfectly in its element – small, unobtrusive, unthreatening, and beautifully responsive in the midst of that chaotic sea of colorful humanity. 

My next outing with the P330 took me to the Louisville Extreme Park.  The Extreme Park is the go to place for local photographers looking to capture action shots. Rollerbladers, Skateboarders, and BMX bikers are drawn to the park 24-7 to perfect their moves in the industrial sized full pipe, 5 interconnected bowls, assorted ramps, and the twelve-foot half pipe. We have some very talented young athletes and a few of them can usually be found at the extreme park. I spent the better part of a hot and unreasonably humid afternoon shooting environmental portraits of skateboarders and BMX bikers.  The P330’s 5x zoom is really too short to work safely with daredevils on skateboards and maniacs on BMX bikes zooming around at alarming speeds - you have to move in pretty close to get frame filling action shots and that can be very dangerous.   I also took the P330 to a couple of Farmer’s Markets and out in the rain to try and shoot fireworks on Independence Day. 

PERFORMANCE

Image Quality
The P330's image quality is reliably excellent in all outdoor shooting venues, noticeably less so for indoor image quality.  That result is not unique to the P330 and actually the P330’s indoor images are substantially and noticeably better than the indoor image quality of ANY of the slow maximum aperture ultra-zoom digicams like Nikon’s P520 or Canon’s SX50 HS.  The P330’s overall image quality is remarkably similar to that of its closest rival – the Canon Powershot S110.  I was able to compare images I shot with the S110 and the P330 and the similarities are obvious and consistent. 

Overall, reds are a bit warm, blues are a little brighter than they are in real life, and greens/yellows/oranges are impressively vibrant.   In addition, the P310's images are highly-detailed and surprisingly sharp.   Most serious photographers like neutral color interpolation (what you see is what you get) and the P330’s color saturation (like that of it’s primary rival) is a bit higher than it should be (for an enthusiast’s camera) but it is never garish.

CONCLUSION
I was a bit disappointed to only have the P330 for a week (especially since I had gotten three weeks with S110), but I did have the camera long enough to know that I really hated to send it back.  The two cameras are remarkably similar – they even look a bit like one another.  Both are quite small, both cameras feature a short high optical quality zoom with a fast maximum aperture, both have near identical specifications, and both cameras share similar features and handling/operation.  If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery – then Canon should be proud that Nikon’s new P330 is almost a dead ringer for the S110.  The only problem with this scenario is deciding which camera to buy.  I have been a serious photographer most of my adult life and a straight shooter for almost as long and I love small high performance P&S digicams.  I would be placed in a serious quandary if I had to choose one over the other – in a perfect world I would get to have both cameras.  For those of you faced with a choice between these two cameras the P330 can be found for about $20.00 less than the S110 ($329.00 vs $349.00) on line, if that helps.   
 
  

Recommend this product? Yes