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The Good The Nikon Coolpix P600 packs a powerful lens, a nice vari-angle LCD, and a respectable set of shooting options and controls that should satisfy auto and manual users alike. Considering its zoom range, the camera is remarkably compact and light.
The Bad While the P600's shooting performance is decent, at times it can feel slow in use. It can be slow to autofocus as well, particularly when fully zoomed in. Also, the lens makes a lot of noise while moving it when recording movies. Enthusiasts might be disappointed by the lack of a hot shoe and raw support.
The Bottom Line The Nikon Coolpix P600 isn't the quickest camera, but that might be a small price to pay for having such a long lens on a relatively compact, lightweight camera.
If there's one thing the Nikon Coolpix P600 has going for it, it's wow factor. Well, at least for birders, stargazers, and anyone else who likes to shoot pictures and movies of distant subjects.
The P600's 60x zoom lens is pretty amazing given the camera's size and weight and price. It's not the only 60x zoom on the market, but unlike options from Panasonic and Samsung that start at an ultrawide-angle 20mm, Nikon's lens starts at 24mm. That means while those other cameras stop at 1,200mm, the P600 can be extended to 1,440mm. If that's not enough, you can use Nikon's new Dynamic Fine Zoom to digitally increase the focal length to 2880mm (and it actually works pretty well assuming you don't look too closely).
Keeping the lens steady and your subject framed up isn't easy, but to help with shake you do get optical image stabilization. And there's an electronic viewfinder so you don't have to hold the camera out in front of you when shooting if you don't want to. Still you'll want to have a tripod handy to get the sharpest possible shots.
As with most small-sensor point-and-shoots, pictures don't look great at full size, but, if you don't typically enlarge and crop in tight on things, this probably won't be much of an issue. It's only really disappointing if you want to take a closer look at something, such as bird, and you might lose a lot of the feather detail.
For however good the camera is with a lot of light, it's not a camera you'll want to use at higher ISOs. Things take a turn for the worse at ISO 800, but really it's above that when details really start to look smeary and colors desaturate. In low-light situations you'll want to take advantage of the camera's scene modes designed specifically for these conditions.
Video quality is generally very good as well as long as you have a lot of light. However, with low-contrast subjects the camera will struggle to focus when zooming all the way in. On the other hand you might not want to move the lens once you start recording anyway because of the amount of noise that's made when moving. Also, when you start a recording there's a delay of a couple seconds while the camera switches from photo to movie mode and starts recording.
The camera's high-speed burst will capture at 7 frames per second at full resolution for up to seven frames (though I clocked it at 8fps). Unfortunately, after you fire off those seven shots, you're left waiting about 30 seconds for them to save before you can shoot again. Other continuous-shooting options include a low-speed full-resolution burst capable of 1fps for up to 30 frames and 120fps and 60fps bursts that capture up to 60 shots at VGA and 1-megapixel resolution, respectively.
Shutter lag -- the time it takes from pressing the shutter release to capture without prefocusing -- is 0.3 second in good lighting, which is tolerable, but in our low-light test with less scene contrast, the shutter lag averaged 1.3 seconds. Once you start extending the lens, the camera takes even longer to focus. Once you get out to the 1,440mm position, it can be very slow to focus. This isn't unusual, just something to be aware of if you're going to shoot fast-moving subjects at the telephoto end of the lens.
The lens is really the bulk of the weight, which makes the rest of the body feel lightweight and cheaply constructed.
There's a small, but decent, electronic viewfinder (EVF) and a Vari-angle LCD for framing up your shots. The LCD flips out from the body and can be rotated up or down. There is a button to switch back and forth between the EVF and LCD, but you can also flip the LCD so it faces into the body to activate the viewfinder.
The camera's interface is easy enough to navigate that first-time users should have no trouble getting around. Navigation is a bit sluggish, though, with a slight delay with every button press. For those who like to actually take control away from the camera and change settings, this can be somewhat frustrating and it doesn't help that outside of the aforementioned function button, there are no buttons for direct control of ISO, white balance, metering, or AF area modes.
There's no accessory shoe for an add-on flash, limiting you to the onboard pop-up one. It doesn't automatically rise when needed, instead remaining off until you push a button on the left side of the camera. It's adequately powerful and there are flash exposure compensation settings available.
Lastly, the P600 has built-in Wi-Fi. You can use it to connect with Android and iOS devices for viewing and transferring photos and videos as well as remotely controlling the camera. Unfortunately, you only get control of the zoom and shutter release and you can't start and stop movie recordings. You can, however, set it to use your smartphone to geotag your photos, which is good since the camera doesn't have GPS.
