VideoHands on review of the Nikon Coolpix P100

The Nikon Coolpix P100 has tons of features and manual controls not found on most point and shoot cameras.  Its also pretty small given the fact that is has a 26x zoom.

It has some hot features including 10fps continuous shooting at full resolution, full 1080p video, and an articulating (flipout) screen.    The screen doesn't seem to rotate to arbitrary angles, but it does tilt out quite far, great to shoot photographs or videos from interesting angles.  The 10fps looks pretty impressive, great for sports.  It will even do 120fps continuous shooting of still images at a low resolution, crazy.

The dial on the top lets you quickly switch from auto to aperture-priority, shutter-priority or full manual, just like a DSLR.  It also includes a command dial on the back making it easy to change aperture or shutter without using the menus.  If you haven't used dials like this before you will love them, way faster and easier than digging into menus.

Right on the back of the camera there is a dial to choose between high definition video and high speed video (240fps) for slow motion.

The reviewer guesses that the camera can do 600 to 800 shots per battery, very impressive.  Thats something I loved when I first used a DSLR such as the Nikon D90, the battery just seems to last forever compared to most point and shoots.

The lens has a huge amount of zoom, and still goes fairly wide (26mm)  , which is almost as wide as cameras go, 24mm tends to be the widest.  The lens also includes image stabilization, to avoid blur from hand shake when zoomed in.  The lens also has a fairly fast aperture, f/2.8 when zoomed out, and f/5 when zoomed in.

The camera has some basic effects built in including skin softening and D-lighting for increased dynamic range.  The menus look quite similar to the Nikon DSLRs.  It includes an interval timer shooting mode for time-lapse, nice.