Over the couple of weeks we’ve had the Nikon Coolpix B700 to play with, we found ourselves using it on those occasions when taking a DSLR along might have proved a tad bulky and indiscrete. Certainly it would be hard if not prohibitively expensive to achieve a comparable focal length with a DSLR – and of course this is the central appeal of a bridge camera or superzoom – namely as a more manageable, achievable alternative. Selecting the PASM modes from the mode dial allows you to select aperture and shutter speed where appropriate using a combination of the multi-selector dial and the thumb-operated rear control dial. The multi-selector controls the aperture and the control dial the shutter speed. That means in Aperture and Shutter priority modes either one or the other is redundant, which is a shame. It would be good to be able to configure the redundant dial for exposure compensation, or even ISO sensitivity. Naturally, while specification might make the Nikon Coolpix B700 look good on paper, it's the performance that counts. And here the SB700 is no slouch, thanks to a swift start up time that Nikon officially places at 1.3 seconds, with a 0.09 second auto focus response upon a half squeeze of its shutter release button, the Nikon deploying contrast detection AF.

On the top panel, the mode dial has positions for auto mode, the PASM modes, three dedicated scene mode positions (Night landscape, Night portrait and Landscape) a Scene position for the remaining scene modes (selected via the screen menu) Creative effects and finally a user defined mode. To the right of the mode dial you’ll find the on/off button and a programmable function button which used to be labelled Fn, but is now Fn1. That’s because the dedicated Wifi button on the rear panel is now a second programmable function button labelled Fn2. MPB puts photo and video kit into more hands, more sustainably. Every month, visual storytellers sell more than 20,000 cameras and lenses to MPB. Choose used and get affordable access to kit that doesn’t cost the earth. The Nikon Coolpix B700 updates the P610 and features the same 60x optical zoom lens, but upgrades the insides to offer a new 20 megapixel sensor, and 4K video recording. Wi-Fi and NFC is built-in and has been joined by low-power Bluetooth to enable low-power transfer of images to a smartphone or tablet. Nikon Coolpix B700 Features

COOLPIX B700 Firmware

The shooting mode wheel, with stiffened feel and ridged edge, features 11 options including standard P,A,S,M selections alongside pre-optimised auto settings. Whilst this, and a command dial that falls under the thumb of your right hand as you grip the camera, both suggest a DSLR ‘lite’ in terms of handling, the rear plate buttons more noticeably match that of a consumer compact camera.

As of Version 2.9, Android users of SnapBridge will also have compatibility with these cameras: D750, D7200, D7100, D5500, D5300, D3300, Df, J5, P900, AW130, S7000 and S3700. Fixed an issue that resulted in unreliable connections between the camera and the iOS 10.2 version of the SnapBridge app. To test the COOLPIX B700’s stabilisation I set it to shutter priority exposure mode, zoomed the lens to its maximum telephoto setting and took a series of shots at progressively slower shutter speeds, first with Vibration reduction set to off and then with it on. As you can see from the crops above, the COOLPIX B700 can produce blur-free shots down to 1/50th at the maximum zoom range; that’s around five stops slower than would generally be considered safe and even more impressive than the four stops I managed with the B500. In all likelihood it’s the B700’s viewfinder that’s making the difference, providing extra stability with the camera pressed to your face. The B700’s 20 Megapixel sensor supports 4k UHD video and as well as PASM exposure modes for stills shooting it has a raft of scene and feature modes. There’s a 3 inch 921k dot vari-angle screen which can face any direction and a 0.2in 921k electronic viewfinder which is particularly useful when using the zoom at or near its maximum range. Using a card slot or card reader, copy the “firmware” folder to a memory card that has been formatted in the camera.

Introduction

This camera’s built-in Wi-Fi ® capability can only be used with a compatible iPhone ®, iPad ®, and/or iPod touch ® or smart devices running on the Android ™ operating system. The Nikon SnapBridge application must be installed on the device before it can be used with this camera. When using the Nikon B700 in P, S, A, or M shooting modes, the ISO range is 100-3200, although it is 100-1600 in all other modes. Similarly, shutter speed varies depending on the selected mode. In M mode with ISO set to 100, you can select shutter speeds as slow as 15s, although the limit is 1s otherwise. The fastest shutter speed available is 1/4000s. Nikon states that you'll be able to capture full-resolution images (including RAW images) at up to 5fps in a 5-shot burst, although the memory card used, and other conditions could affect the speed of capture.

The Nikon Coolpix B700’s 40x zoom lens achieves a maximum wide-angle focal length equivalent to 24mm, and is capable of a telephoto reach of 1440mm (in 35mm camera terms). Run F-B700-V16W.exe to extract the firmware to a sub-folder in the new folder. The resulting file and folder hierarchy is shown below: There is a dial to adjust shutter speed and / or aperture depending on which mode you are in. In manual mode you can use this dial, as well as the rear scroll wheel so that you can adjust shutter and aperture directly. The rear scroll wheel can be used for cycling through the menus. Surrounding this wheel is the d-pad to access exposure compensation, macro mode, self-timer and the flash. Electronic viewfinder 0.5 cm (0.2-in.) approx. 921k-dot equivalent LCD with the diopter adjustment function (–3 to +1 m-¹) Manual transfer using the Bluetooth connection means you only get the keepers on your phone, but it involves a bit more time and effort, not least because the slow Bluetooth connection means it can take a long time to display thumbnails of all the images on the camera’s card on your phone screen, find and select the ones you want, then queue them for transfer. I’d go far as to say if you’re not using SnapBridge’s Bluetooth connection for automatic image transfer, you’re probably better off using Wifi if you want to manually transfer selected images.Compatible devices are those capable of acquiring location information and those that support BLE (iPhone ® 5S and later, iPad ® 5th Generation and later, iPhone X or later). Vibration reduction reduces camera shake so you’ll always get sharp images with optimal exposure, regardless of your shooting conditions. The 5-stop Dual Detect Optical VR² gives a compensation effect equivalent to a shutter speed 5 stops faster. This can eliminate the need for faster shutter speeds, preventing issues like improper exposure or over-increased sensitivity. By utilising the camera shake information detected by the angular velocity sensor together with the data on direction and amount of camera shake (motion vector information), the newly-developed VR algorithm enables a more accurate calculation of the amount of image blur to achieve a greatly enhanced vibration reduction performance.

The Nikon Coolpix B700 is a digital camera that offers a range of features suitable for both amateur and experienced photographers. It is designed to be compact and portable, making it easy to carry around for various shooting situations. The COOLPIX B700’s lens has a 60x optical range starting at 24mm and extending to 1440mm in 35 equivalent numbers. If you want to see what that looks like practice take a look at the two images below which show the coverage at either end of the range. Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese If you're looking for a lot of optical zoom, in an ultra-zoom bridge camera, designed to "Do-it-all", then the Nikon Coolpix B700 does a good job of providing almost everything you could possibly want, including 4K video recording, a 60x optical zoom lens, a vari-angle 3inch screen, a built-in electronic viewfinder, built-in Wi-Fi, NFC and Bluetooth, manual controls, raw shooting, and more. Where the camera suffers is in image quality, with some images appearing soft. Next to the viewfinder is a small sensor which automatically turns the viewfinder on and the screen off when you raise the camera to your eye. There’s also a button to turn off the sensor and switch views manually if you prefer. Why would you want to do that? Well sometimes, for example if the camera is mounted on a tripod and you’re shielding the screen from sunlight with your hand, or when you’re shooting from the waist with the screen flipped up, the sensor can detect your hand or body and toggle to the viewfinder when you don’t want it to.

The COOLPIX B700’s combined battery and card compartment is located in the grip and accessed via a door in the base of the camera. It takes the same EN-EL23 battery as the earlier P610 and you can expect to get around 440 shots from a full charge – nearly a hundred more than previously. If a movie was recorded in “U (User settings) mode” with RAW + Fine or RAW + Normal for Image quality, the Image quality option stored using Save user settings would change to RAW. Alongside the newly-announced Nikon A900 compact travel-zoom camera, the B700 is one of the first Nikon Coolpix cameras to offer users the ability to record 4K (UHD) video. The B700 can capture 4K resolution video at up to 30 fps and 1080p video at up to 60 fps. High speed video recording modes are available as well, offering up to 120 fps recording at 640 x 480 resolution. Paired with the 1/2.3-inch type sensor is a 4.3-258mm lens, which provides the 35mm equivalent field of view of a 24-1440mm lens. The lens' maximum aperture range is f/3.3-6.5, and it includes sixteen elements in eleven groups. There are four ED lens elements and one super ED element in this 60x optical zoom Nikkor ED lens. Whilst the Nikon Coolpix B700 bridge camera handles quite capably, how does the camera fare in terms of image quality, which is, after all, why we’re buying the thing. Read on to find out!