The Bridge Is Now A Snap

Remember the old days when the connection between you taking pictures and you seeing them was a chemist shop and a week's wait? Well, you can restrict your visit to the chemist's to buying overpriced vitamins and something for the weekend - you need not wait for your pictures with the Nikon Coolpix B700.

The new feature of a number of Nikon cameras now is SnapBridge. It is a low-powered Bluetooth connection that your camera can make to your mobile phone or tablet. If this sounds old-hat, the difference now is that the business of connecting he two wirelessly does not need a complex procedure every time you swith one or other of the devices on - there is a continuous connectivity once you have made the initial connection, and you are spared trying to remember yet another blasted password.

This may be the closest yet to a combination of a true camera with the ubiquitous phone or tablet - and it opens the way for competent yet lightweight travel reportage. if you are addicted to selfieing your way around th world you can pester your Facebook friends with high-quality Nikon shots instead of a low-resolution phone image.

This Nikon camera has one of the tourist-bridge lenses that goes to an extreme of 60X zoom range optically and then steps off to another 4X electronically. This is the lion/bear/NK border guard sort of shooting that you just cannot get with a phone. The fact that the camera also has a VR mechanism makes the whole thing plausible. The range of focus - from 1cm in macro out to infinity in the zoom range means you can pursue most tourist shots.

It is a 1/2.3" CMOS sensor in there and can run up to 3200 ISO so you will stand some chance of working in low light. f3.3-6.5 on the lens. a 3" LCD screen and about 400 shots per battery charge - BTW, it charges in-camera so that is one less charger to pack.

Now for that lens performace...Jandakot on a bright morning. The shutter will go to 1/4000 second, but I doubt you'd need that for most of the light aircraft. Some of them just sat there with their rotors turning...And the magpies are the most blasé birds I have ever seen.

Actually, the chief problem using a lens this powerful on a small camera is actually tracking the targets. You need a duck-shooter's eye to lead them enough...

See the Nikon range on the Camera Electronic website here