Do you have a 5700?
LCD Design: Sure, the FULLY ARTICULATING LCD is terrible ... when
I can hold the camera well over my head to take shots and still
frame properly. I can take shots around corners .. I can take
shots of myself. I can do whatever I want. Does the 707 have
this? The little swivel is pretty useless, I found.
I've had two Nikons (CoolPix 950 and 990) thinking Nikon has always been the best, yet they both had horrible focusing, dim or bright lighting, didn't matter. It was such a problem that when taking critical photos, before leaving the photo shoot I would have to confirm the images were actually in focus on a laptop I had to take with me just for that purpose.
No matter how many features a camera has or how good its lens is, it is all useless if can't be relied on to take an image that's in focus and from extensive reading of reviews and the Nikon forums and talking with sales staff at the local camera stores that promote Nikon, the 5700 seems to have inherited this legacy of poor focusing. I really wanted a 5700. There were many things about the 5700 I liked, but I just couldn't bring myself to risk a third Nikon having the same problem.
The F707 has yet to give me an out of focus image.
To me, having the best digital image possible for the money is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary.
So before buying my latest camera, I researched Nikon’s 5700, Minolta’s DiMAGE 7i, Sony’s F707, Canon’s D60, Nikon’s D100, and Fuji’s S2. I read every review I could find, analyzed every full resolution image I could download (which for the six cameras now fills a CD), and played with each camera in the camera stores except the S2.
Not surprisingly, the DSLRs produced the best image, but I eventually ruled them out as still being too expensive when I learned the F707 produces images of nearly equal quality. If one of the DSLRs had a 6Mp Foveon sensor, I would have bought it.
Otherwise, for my purposes, the prosumer cameras were my choice and among them, in addition to my fear of Nikon’s continuing focusing issues which fill the Nikon forums, its lens is slower than the F707's and digital imagery needs all the speed it can get and the Nikon’s images weren’t as sharp. This has nothing to do with in-camera sharpening. I LAB sharpened all full resolution files I downloaded to their maximum amount and the Sony F707 produced clearly sharper images. Since everything else is more or less equal, this could only be coming from the lens.
And since, as I said, having the best digital image possible for the money is the most important thing to me, this immediately put the F707 at the top of the heap.
Nikon’s white balance and macro are outstanding but mean nothing if the resulting image lacks the definition achieved by another camera, unless macro is your primary goal.
The Minolta had many features I really liked, particularly the more traditional manual controls, but every image I saw from the camera had pervasive noise to the point of being objectionable to me and had the 5700’s same lack of acute clarity.
So all three prosumer cameras had terrific features and many shortcomings and if you could put all the good features into one camera you’d have one heck of a camera. But short of that, the F707 produced images that were nearly equal to DSLRs, had less image noise, faster lens, and absolutely incredible battery life. It has many features missing in the other cameras and is missing many features found in other cameras, but those I can live without since it gives the best digital image possible for the money.
Gordon
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No matter where you are...there you are.
