When I first became interested in photography, I was handed a Pentax SLR and a 50mm normal lens and told to create some photographs. Since then, I’ve worked with, and owned, SLR gear or larger. I’ve never owned a pocket camera or point and shoot camera in my life (cell phone cameras excluded)… until now.

Okay, so the Nikon P7000 is not exactly the point and shoot that you would buy for your grandparents, but it’s compact enough for me to put in my coat pocket for whenever I run out and don’t feel like lugging around a Nikon D3 + lens(es) + flash + you get the idea.

The P7000 is referred to a “bridge” camera, because it is an in-between from a tiny compact P&S and the larger SLR cameras such as the D70, D300, etc. It still has many of the features you would find in the SLR cameras, such as manual control, shutter/aperture priority, custom metering, etc. but in a compact camera (ok, slightly larger) footprint with fixed zoom lens. It also has a lot of the gimmick marketing bells and whistles that are used by marketers to sell camera gear to consumers.

This is by no means meant to be an in-depth review of the Nikon P7000. There are plenty of places on the internet to find such reviews. Besides, they would likely do a better job at an official review than I would. I’m just writing this from a user’s perspective for those who might be interested in my initial experience with the camera. For some, that’s a good compliment to an official review since it’s more subjective.

I’ve put together a small gallery of images that I’ve captured with the new camera, and I have to say I’m happy with the result. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not going to capture the same type of image that my pro gear will; it’s more for that quick shot of family/friends while out, or someone’s pet looking cute, or a rainbow or other memorable scene. It is pretty forgiving in low light, compared to some other P&S cameras.

The only issues I’ve had, and these have mostly been brought up elsewhere on the web, are as follows:

• No Lightroom support. Well, not at first. Now that Lightroom 3.3 is available as RTM, all you need to do is upgrade to the new version, and there’s support built-in.
• RAW files are painfully slow to write to the memory card. This has been addressed with a firmware release, and it’s helped a bit… probably now about 40% faster at writing RAW files.
• There was an issue with the lens not focusing, and then having to re-initialize. This seems to have been fixed via the above mentioned firmware release.
• White balance is COMPLETELY off for most images after import. This can be easily corrected with ACR or within Lightroom, but it’s still a pain.
• Macro mode stinks. But then again, I am a macro photographer, so the bar is pretty high as far as I’m concerned.
• For some reason, Nikon released a new RAW format for this camera. Why? Also, the files are LARGER than the RAW files I am shooting with my D3! Seriously?
• There’s no reliable Windows 7 codec support for reading the new RAW files. Nikon has released a codec, but all it does is crash my Windows machine when I have it installed. Hopefully this will be addressed and corrected soon.