Nikon Coolpix 5200

The 5.1-megapixel Nikon Coolpix 5200 is a fun, compact camera that's almost small enough to be considered an ultra-compact. It's packed with features, but exposure and color-accuracy problems make it hard for us to give it a whole-hearted recommendation for anyone but casual shooters. It can't stand up to our favorite 5.0MP compact, the Canon PowerShot S60, in terms of image quality, though it does have the boxy Canon beat on looks and weight. The stylish, compact 5.1MP Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P100 also shoots better-exposed and slightly sharper images (and shoots them more quickly), for $50 less. You might also want to consider the 7.1MP Canon PowerShot S70, our latest Editors' Choice compact camera.

The Coolpix 5200 has a 38- to 114-mm (35-mm equivalent), f/2.8 to f/4.9, 3X optical zoom lens with extra-low dispersion (ED) glass. Users are more likely to frame their shots with the bright but small 1.5-inch LCD than with the optical viewfinder, which is also quite small and exhibits considerable barrel distortion.

The camera has plenty of features, but the menus are confusing, making many items a bit tricky to find. And unfortunately, the Coolpix 5200 lacks full manual control. It does offer a few features we particularly like, such as in-camera red-eye fix, as well as auto-bracketing and white-balance bracketing, which give you the same shot taken at slightly different exposure and white-balance settings and let you pick the best one. We also like the very useful five-shot buffer feature, which allows the camera to shoot continuously, storing shots in a temporary memory buffer. When you release the shutter button, the camera writes the last five shots in the buffer to the SD card. A related feature is Nikon's best-shot selector. You can take up to ten shots of the same subject, which are stored in the buffer, and the camera will analyze the images and pick the best-exposed shot to write to the card. It's hard to judge how well this feature works, but it seemed to yield positive results most of the time.

The camera did reasonably well on our resolution tests. It scored a good 1,250 average lines of resolution and a quite respectable 2.15 percent average pixel-transition ratio. The Canon PowerShot S60 wins on lines of resolution, at 1,300, but its 2.45 percent pixel-transition ratio lags behind the Coolpix 5200's.

Images were sharp overall, though daylight still-life shots were underexposed, with colors a touch too warm and noise in the shadows. Our flash shots fared better, showing good exposure and strong illumination, though the colors were cool.

The Coolpix 5200's boot time of 4.4 seconds isn't particularly fast, and its 2.9-second recycle time is fair. Compare with the Canon S60's better 3.8-second recycle time and 2.6-second recycle time. And the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P100, which boots up in 1.8 seconds and recycles in a smoking 1.5 seconds, outdoes them both.

There's a lot to like about the Nikon Coolpix 5200: It's small, handy, and stylish, and it's jammed with great features. It takes reasonably sharp pictures. It could be speedier, though, and exposure and color-accuracy issues prevent it from receiving top honors.

Benchmark Test
Click here to view the Nikon Coolpix 5200 benchmark test results