saze
New member
3 common faults you need to know about this camera - see the problems section below.
But for these faults, it'd be a great little camera. Solidly made. Functonal rather than intuitive in the way it handles. Flip and twist screen is great.
I wanted a camera that was at least 28mm equiv at the wide end, and had a flash hot shoe or sync socket. That brought my short list down to just a few, and the Nikon 5400 is small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and being discounted heavily at the moment.
Problems:
Alas I learn too late that there are three common problems for these cameras:
1) In low light (well, anything less that bright light) it cannot auto focus. And as for manual focus, forget it, unless you can judge how far away something is on a scale of tulip to mountain (no kidding, that's how the manual focus scale is calibrated!)
2) When you play back movies direct from the camera, the sound is in sync with the pictures. But when you save the movie (.mov file) to any computer and play it from there, the sound lags behind the pictures very noticably. They all do that, sir.
3) This may not affect all of these, but it affects me and I have (now) read of other users with the same experience. Pictures at infinity with the lens fully zoomed in are badly soft - it seems that this camera cannot focus to infinity. Other users have had happy experiences with sending it off to Nikon and getting it back with this fixed 2 weeks later. My experience so far is sending it off to Nikon UK at my expense and getting it back 3 weeks later with a note saying, "All functions tested - unable to recreate fault specified."
So I'll be sending it off to Nikon again. More postage, more time without my camera.
PS To the above, some weeks later:
I discovered another fault endemic to this model. If you choose the infinity focus option but point it at a scene that includes something about 2.5m away as well as at infinity, guess what? It ignores the infinity focus setting and focusses at 2.5m! So what exactly is the point of an infinity focus mode that may or may not focus at infinity?
After more to-ing and fro-ing I did get mine swapped for another new one. The second one was better on the soft-at-max-zoom problem (so we conclude that was a matter of poor quality control in the lens department), but the low level light focus problem, the video sound sync problem, and the may-not-honour-infinity focus problem were all just the same. I guess Nikon knew that all these cameras did this but shipped anyway. It may be good enough for Nikon, but not for me. It went back and all credit to the long-suffering retailer, I was refunded.
But for these faults, it'd be a great little camera. Solidly made. Functonal rather than intuitive in the way it handles. Flip and twist screen is great.
I wanted a camera that was at least 28mm equiv at the wide end, and had a flash hot shoe or sync socket. That brought my short list down to just a few, and the Nikon 5400 is small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and being discounted heavily at the moment.
Problems:
Alas I learn too late that there are three common problems for these cameras:
1) In low light (well, anything less that bright light) it cannot auto focus. And as for manual focus, forget it, unless you can judge how far away something is on a scale of tulip to mountain (no kidding, that's how the manual focus scale is calibrated!)
2) When you play back movies direct from the camera, the sound is in sync with the pictures. But when you save the movie (.mov file) to any computer and play it from there, the sound lags behind the pictures very noticably. They all do that, sir.
3) This may not affect all of these, but it affects me and I have (now) read of other users with the same experience. Pictures at infinity with the lens fully zoomed in are badly soft - it seems that this camera cannot focus to infinity. Other users have had happy experiences with sending it off to Nikon and getting it back with this fixed 2 weeks later. My experience so far is sending it off to Nikon UK at my expense and getting it back 3 weeks later with a note saying, "All functions tested - unable to recreate fault specified."
So I'll be sending it off to Nikon again. More postage, more time without my camera.
PS To the above, some weeks later:
I discovered another fault endemic to this model. If you choose the infinity focus option but point it at a scene that includes something about 2.5m away as well as at infinity, guess what? It ignores the infinity focus setting and focusses at 2.5m! So what exactly is the point of an infinity focus mode that may or may not focus at infinity?
After more to-ing and fro-ing I did get mine swapped for another new one. The second one was better on the soft-at-max-zoom problem (so we conclude that was a matter of poor quality control in the lens department), but the low level light focus problem, the video sound sync problem, and the may-not-honour-infinity focus problem were all just the same. I guess Nikon knew that all these cameras did this but shipped anyway. It may be good enough for Nikon, but not for me. It went back and all credit to the long-suffering retailer, I was refunded.