Click to Enlarge The P50 also uses a 2.4-inch (115,000-dot) LCD that doubles as a menu screen. In our field tests, the screen appeared sharp and mostly bright, but noticeably more coarse than comparable screens with higher pixel counts. It was also difficult to see in some situations when strong sunlight was at our back. While many other LCD screens fare similarly in this situation, the P50 seemed to suffer sunlight glare to an extreme. The good news though is that unlike many other cameras in this price range, the P50 has an optical viewfinder that will allow basic composition of the image, even in the brightest and darkest shooting situations. Interestingly though, you don't have to turn the LCD off to use the viewfinder, but doing so eliminates "LCD blinding."
Turning off the LCD screen viewfinder is a simple button push. On the up side, the finder zooms in tandem to the lens racking and gives you an approximate shooting scene. The down side with this system is that it's small and not too friendly to those who wear eyeglasses. There's no dioptor correction either, making it difficult to compose using this finder without glasses. Another complaint is that the optical finder only shows 80% of the image area, making composing the image a hit-or-miss proposition. Parallax is also a concern since the lens making the image is situated differently from the viewfinder. Another item that bothered us was that because of the hand grip located on the right side of the camera, your index finger tends to show in the optical viewfinder, making it difficult to see the scene well enough to compose the image. Again, to be fair to the P50, these are issues that have been encountered with other similar cameras such as the P5100. The lesson here is to use the LCD viewfinder if precise framing is required.
The P50 has VR image stability that differs from the more expensive P5100. In the P5100, image stability is achieved by having what Nikon describes as an "Angular Velocity Sensor," which detects shake and applies movement using motors that are attached to the glass optics in the lens. The P50 still uses the Angular Velocity Sensor, but rather than having a physical lens element move, calculations are made in the EXPEED processing engine that dampen or eliminate the effects of image shake, which are then corrected in the image file itself. While this will not produce the same quality in comparison to optical VR lenses, it's is an amazingly sophisticated system for a sub-$200 camera. Most comparably priced cameras with "Anti-shake" simply raise the ISO to create a higher shutter speed, which will ultimately reduce the overall image quality by introducing additional noise into the image. Nikon has taken the high-road here and, judging from the samples we shot, it's system appears to work well.
The focus was quick and snappy, with little lag time and dead-on focus and exposure more often than not. Bursting shots was surprisingly good as well, firing off six frames in five seconds, which places the P50 on the fast side of the economical point and shoot category. The P50 was able to shoot continuously for 15 seconds before stopping to write the files, giving you a total of 18 images before the buffer clogs up.
One of the biggest disappointments is that the P50 is weak on macro capabilities and again, like the P5100, seems to get worse with higher focal lengths. Nikon's specs say that the closest macro distance is 5cm, which pales in comparison to other similar cameras by Canon, Fuji and Olympus that can get in as close as 1cm in many cases. This was perhaps the single most distressing flaw in the P50.
When we examined the images shot with the P50, they were zoomed to 200% in Photoshop CS3 before seeing the typical noise and artifacting that's common in point and shoot cameras. It became obvious that the EXPEED processing is much more than a catchy name, and has clearly put Nikon's image processing engine at the head of the pack. Considering the combination of excellent glass, ample megapixels, VR and EXPEED processing, the images produced by the P50 should make some excellent enlargements given a technically correct image file.
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