Camera information & reviews

• Coolpix 5000 info from Nikon
• Coolpix 5000 specsheet (PDF)
• DCRP Review
• Steve's DigiCams Review
• Peter iNova's Review
• Imaging Resource Review
• A Digital Eye review
• Larry Berman review/info
• My notes on the camera

Using the Coolpix 5000 for shooting Panoramas

Basic photo gear to consider:

• tripod
• panhead (positioning)
• double bubble level
• HN-E5000 lens hood
• adequate CF storage
• remote control
• extra Li-Ion batteries (EN-EL1)

Coolpix 5000 Resources

• Nikon Firmware v1.6
• Lens cap firmware bug news & Nikon's notice
• Peter iNova's eBook
• DPReview's Nikon forum
• Noise reducing Photoshop action for cp5k

Sample Panoramas

CP 5k post-production

Most digital camera lenses have some degree of barrel distortion. This may make it more difficult to stitch your panorama. The CP5000's built-in lens doesn't appear to have enough distortion to cause problems stitching. Still no answer on the WC-E68 lens.

Digital Camera Resources

• digital camera resource
• digital photography review
• Imaging Resource
• Steve's DigiCams
• RobGalbraith
• Secrets of Digital Photography
• photo.net
• Fred Miranda PSD plugins

Analysis of camera features for panoramic photography:

Lenses: The built-in lens provides a relatively wide-angle focal length at minimum zoom equivalent to 28mm lens in a 35mm SLR. Nikon sells a wide-angle adapter equivalent to 19mm lens (SLR), as well as a fisheye lens. For my purposes, the more wide-angle options the better. 99% of my panoramas were shot with lenses between 17-28mm. Wide-angle means capturing more vertical field-of-view, which for most scenes means more stuff to look at. When shooting cubic panoramas, the greater wide-angle lens means less shots and fewer rows to capture the whole scene.

Resolution: 3 megapixel cameras had enough resolution to build quite respectable panoramas; using the 24mm equivalent wide-angle adapter on the CP99x, you can get a stitched panorama that is 10000 pixels long by 2000 pixels high. The Coolpix 5000 can capture up to 2560 x 1920 pixel images. Stitching the same number of 5 megapixel images together should result in about a 13000 x 2500 pixel final image--assuming the same 24mm lens setting. That's enough pixels to produce a 44 inch wide IRISprint. Yes, you can still extract more data from ISO100 film, but few people do.

Storage: The CP5000 supports CompactFlash I or II memory cards, including the IBM Microdrive, which means you can shoot many panoramas before having to switch cards. The largest CompactFlash card available at the camera's announcement is the IBM 1GB Microdrive, but 1GB conventional memory CF cards have been announced. The ability to shoot ~680 highest resolution images before switching cards is a big advantage over digicams which use lagging memory formats such as memory sticks or SmartMedia. For instance, the Sony DSC-F707 can only have 128MB of memory in the camera, or about 64 highest res shots.

Manual control: When shooting multiple shots to capture a single panorama, you need to lock in the aperature/shutter settings for all the shots in the circle. Therefore shooting panoramas is greatly facilitated by having a manual mode that overrides the usual "automatic everything" logic. The Coolpix 5000 continues to use the excellent Nikon standard manual control. You can also lock the white balance setting.

Shutter speeds: Most digital cameras provide a decent range of shutter speeds, but many cameras fall down in situations where there is either very little light or too much light. Fortunately the CP5000 catches up with SLRs by providing shutter speeds as fast as 1/4000th of a second, and as slow as 5 minutes in Bulb mode. I regularly shoot 10-30 second exposures in dark forest locations, so the CP5000 looks good in this department. What remains to be seen is how much noise there is at these long exposures.

Level Shooting: The camera has a flash hot-shoe which enables using a double-bubble for monitoring the camera's levelness. This is extremely important for those times when you don't have a tripod and want to shoot a hand-held panorama. It's still very important for use on a panhead, because you still need to verify that the camera is level when on the panhead. So a digicam without a hotshoe (like the Coolpix 99x) reduces your ability to shoot level and aligned scenes.

Fast Shooting: Film cameras have set an expectation of minimal delays in between shots, but the first few generations of digicams didn't measure up in this category. There are times when the sunlight is not stable and you want to shoot an entire 12 shot scene as fast as possible, so this is an important criteria for panoramic cameras. The CP5000 shooting speed is faster than the CP99x, but is it fast enough?

Dynamic range: Many people have commented that Nikon should have provided a raw file format for CP5000 images, presumably so that more dynamic range could be extracted out of the data. On the dpreview Nikon forum, David SL shows how more dynamic range can be extracted from stock CP5000 images in post-production.

Physical construction: The camera's skin is made of magnesium alloy, and the tripod mount is metal. I think these are important when shooting outdoors or using a panhead all the time. The tripod mount point takes a lot of stress that it might not experience with general Point and Shoot usage.

(tentative) conclusion: In the $1K digicam category, the Coolpix 5000 looks to be a fine choice for shooting panoramas. I've shot about 60 panoramas with the camera, and the built-in lens performs well. A potential concern remains with shots that include the sun, which then "blows out" the sky like the CP99x (see this review for someone else's concern on that). I see some CCD noise but it has not made panoramas look bad. Most of the reviews have been quite positive, but none of the reviewers to date are focused on panoramic shooting.

If you have comments or have shot panoramas with the CP5000, let me know your view. I will keep updating this page with new information.

Last updated 10-Jul-2002