Nikon Coolpix 5200 Review

--David Cardinal, December, 2004

The first thing I noticed about the Nikon Coolpix 5200 is how small it was. Even smaller than the Canon A80 or Nikon Coolpix 4300 I reviewed last holiday season. And even smaller than the Canon Powershot A95 that I friend of mine just bought. It made me pause and think about what has become possible with digital. Here was a 5 Mega-pixel camera that I could literally hold in the palm of my hand or stick in my trouser pocket. And unlike some of the touted "micro-cameras" and "phone cameras" that have 5MP but not much in the way of image quality, this one was a Nikon, chock full of features. So next was to check out the image quality.

In short, it passes with flying colors. For a point and shoot it captures vibrant colors, especially with outdoor or sufficient flash lighting. Left in full "Auto" mode it is more than adequate to chronicle a vacation or for quietly shooting street scenes from an unobtrusive location. Like any other point & shoot (and frankly most D-SLRs) the Auto WB has limits. You'll be surprised at how well it does in sunlight or some outdoor mixed light, but in shadows or indoor lighting you may need to tweak the images in Photoshop to get them at their best.

Unlike with D-SLRs, where I'm a fanatic about completely controlling the image and use few of the camera's "Auto" features, with point and shoots I tend to do just the opposite. Since the whole point to me of carrying one is quick & easy photography I leave it set in Auto mode most of the time. Partly this is because point & shoots have traditionally had painful controls for modifying many of the settings. Nikon has gone a long way to fix this issue in the Coolpix 5200. The menu system is relatively straightforward and better yet has large easy to read characters and a simple interface. Plus, key functions such as control of the flash are handled without resorting to the menus at all--simply by using the dual-function "cursor up" key on the back of the camera to pop-up a quick menu of flash possibilities.

Nikon didn't stop with fixing the menus. They also added a slew of advanced presets they refer to as "Scenes." Frankly I've only begun to explore the possibilities of the scene modes, but they try to mimic many of the complex combinations of settings you could achieve manually on previous cameras or a D-SLR with a simple icon based interface that changes all the necessary parameters at once.

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