Monday, June 1, 2020

Nikon A900 review and issues/problems/drawbacks.

Everything about the camera is expected; for the size, it's the best that you can get at night photography (which is still deficient) as of 2019.

Before you buy, these are a few drawbacks --

1) The slowest shutter speed is 8 seconds in reality. No it's not 25; 25 seconds is given by some 'mode' which useless actually.
2) Black round bands are seen on the edges of the pictures sometimes. I think this is is because of the image stabilizer. Solution is to zoom in and then zoom out and soon it'll fix itself. This issue calls in for a warranty claim! And yes -- warranty has been claimed. The highly abused lens has now been replaced.
3) Autofocus is terrible! Even while shooting videos. And there's no manual focus to make matters worst. To provide a global e.g. just try to shoot moon so it's craters can be seen. This's not possible without fully zooming into the moon.
4) The camera hangs sometimes.
5) Wi-Fi picture transfer feature is non-standard. It requires a Windows 'driver'; so it wont work on Linux/BSD. I use P2P over USB instead.
6) Transferring pictures to phone over wifi is broken. So is remote photography (actually the phone never connects to the 'smart device' over wifi).
7) Battery charging is extremely slow.
8) Battery display has only 2 levels -- full, and low (that 50% mark is not, medium, it's low actually, and you're hardly going to get any backup beyond that).

On the very plus size, the IS is very good! Audio recording is great too!