Closest I've seen to a universal carry-around camera

Sam in Hawaii wrote:

I can't believe we're actually arguing about the Nikon 1. I thought they'd all gone to that big darkroom in the sky. Agree, they had the best autofocus I've ever seen in a small camera, but were inferior in almost every other way. The control set alone on the V1 was enough to make one crazy. And looking back at photos I took with my V2, the noise was worse than I expected. Too bad, I really liked them, hoped the V3 would have gone a different direction (built in EVF, for one thing). I think the system must have been designed by a committee. Or maybe Ashton Kutcher really did have a hand in it.

I would still like a really waterproof, good, 1" sensor or larger, camera, but it doesn't exist. The AW1 was too prone to leak, I guess the Nikonos designers retired

The V2 is actually the only Nikon 1 camera that I'll defend, because it's the only one without brain-dead ergonomics (and not surprisingly, it's the only one I kept and used - and I totally agree with you about the V1 and V3). I also agree with you about the noise, although it was no problem when shooting at ISO 200-400.

I really wish that once Nikon had access to the sensor that eventually went into the J5, they would have taken the low resource approach and just dropped it into a V2 body, called it a V5 and not changed much else and THEN abandoned the system.

I am about 95% a Micro 4/3 user (including E-PL7 and E-M1 i ), but I can still find a small percentage of subject matter for which my V2 is better: basically, Birds in flight, Air shows, and rapid, random direction changing sporting events - all in bright sunlight. And that's it, nothing else.

Watching the evolution of the Nikon 1 product line, one has to wonder if Nikon's product marketing team was not taking orders from Olympus and Canon with the specific objective of causing the product line to fail.