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

dougjgreen1 wrote:

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.

I was amazed when the stripped down N1 series came out came out seeing the menus as I always thought the wade through the pages system in my P7100 were because there were so many controls.

The camera makers especially Olympus thought the way to compete with DSLRs was primarily to strip the cameras bare of any but the most essential controls and viewfinders and put no effort in to producing penetrable and easy to use menus or rear screens that did not disappear from view as the sun came up and double the price of everything. Always a great mystery why mirrorless never took off.