In white it looks very stylish and has direct mounted kit lens about the size and weight of a compact camera in the super zoom range. Thus, it is significantly smaller than an SLR, in a jacket pocket but only with fashionable portable collateral damage.
Processing appears orderly, correct quality it does not act in her dress but plastic. Many potential dust case doors in the form of columns and the rather rickety main wheel at the rear give rise to first ask how it will look with the reliability. Sand and rain should be avoided at any rate more than other cameras.
The key layout is quite classic. Above, a dial for the operating modes, Main and Quick Movie Shutter. On the left edge USB, HDMI port and lightning discharge, the rear of the display playback, menu and clear key, and a rotary multi selector.
While the menu for setting the basic functions and operating modes are fairly self-explanatory, as well as the basic functions during shooting (Self-timer, exposure, flash control), it is in semiautomatic Creativ mode rather a hidden object game, if you want to make manual settings.
The setting to choose a focus point manually one seeks in vain. You can only select different measurement methods or completely manually. With the latter you get an enlarged detail to support the focus on the wheel at the rear.
In addition, there are effects and special programs such as Panorama, Night mode and motion blur. Panoramic and the blur bring good results, with the night scene is not much difference was visible. With lantern lighting at night in combination with snow, the camera seems to be already completely overwhelmed. Disadvantage of these programs is that you have to wait a few seconds after pressing the shutter button until an image is processed and stored.
Imaging performance. Although the jpgs out of the box to see at 100% slightly noisy from the reproduction of detail per se, however, is quite good and the artifacts are holding back, even at high ISO values. Unfortunately this does not help much, because the faint kit lens ensures that a higher ISO value has to be chosen and nullifies the advantage again. In a direct comparison with an identical exposure focal length with the Leica D-Lux 5, the J3 required at 1 / 80s ISO 1600, while the D-Lux at 1 / 80s ISO 400 was enough.
With a small image portion of 27-81mm kit lens is not already best in class, suffers as everyday zoom but especially at the Aperture range 3.5-5.6.
Magnifications in Viewing Mode are also not particularly elegant solution. If you want to zoom into a picture, you have to press before each time the button in the steering wheel in order to then use the steering wheel as Zoom can.
What can you say in summary?
The camera itself would not be bad, would not always one or the other lack make a spanner in the works and a spoil photographing. It steals a feeling that this is at least partly of Nikon's intention is not to much to make themselves competitive. So the J3 of function, quality, result DSLRs is markedly inferior and can not stand apart from ambitious compact cameras enough to get a strong buy recommendation.
Conclusion. Pretty clear 3 points, but still have potential for more firmware improvements.
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If it should be the J3, lends itself taking little expensive kit with 2 lenses, the significantly increased with the additional use 30-110mm range.
Nikon 1 J3 system camera (14 megapixels, 7.6 cm (3 inch) LCD display, Full HD) Double Zoom Kit incl. 1 Nikkor 10-30 mm and 30-110 mm lens white
Since the camera has no mirror system J3 and dust endangered the sensor when changing lenses even more personally I would take a combination that makes a changing lenses unnecessary. The Nikon 1 Nikkor VR 10-100mm lens (27-270mm small picture) is in itself larger, heavier, which is relative when you have to carry around for no other objective. The 4 panel is more than offset by the larger glass (55mm instead of 40.5mm filter thread).
When Nikon has the kit from J3 and 10-100mm lens the article number VVA181K006.
Unfortunately, I could only find here separate deals on the J3 and the true everyday lens:
Nikon 1 Nikkor lens VR 10-100mm 1: 4-5.6 PD-Zoom white
