Innovations in shutter and focus technology star in Nikon's new CSCs

• Official Nikon 1 press release

Nikon's V1 is the flagship of Nikon's new compact system camera platform.

We've had a brief play with the new Nikon 1 family of compact system cameras and the four lenses that the system launched with today. Further down this page you can browse a gallery of 45 photos taken at the UK launch event that took place earlier this morning.

To summarise the key points from today's launch:

• The managing director of Nikon UK, Michio Miwa, said that in his 30 years working for Nikon, today's news was the most exciting yet.
• Nikon says the V1 and J1 cameras can now claim to have the fastest AF in the industry thanks to a 600 megapixels per second read-out speed from the CX CMOS sensor.
• Up to 60 frames per second high resolution shooting is possible.
• Motion Snapshot mode records a sequence of images even before you fully press the shutter so you are recording even before the action you are anticipating. The sequence can be played back in slow motion.
• Smart Photo Selector - up to 20 high resolution stills are recorded in a sequence at up to 30 frames per second. The camera than automatically analyses the frames and discards the least sharp and preserves 5 frames, one of which is recommended to the photographer as the best.
• Full HD 1080 resolution is supported at 30 and 60 frames per second.
• The CX format CMOS sensor is a 10.1 megapixel device with a cropping factor of 2.7x. That makes it smaller than Micro Four Thirds (Panasonic Lumic G-Micro and Olympus Pen) which was the smallest sensor in a CSC apart from the much smaller compact camera in the Pentax Q system.
• The J1 has no mechanical shutter. It relies completely on the sensor to function as a solid state electronic shutter, but this can operate as fast as 1/16,000th sec. The V1 has the same facility as well as a conventional mechanical focal plane with a maximum speed of 1/4000th sec.
• 135 point contrast detect AF is used as well as 73-point phase detect AF, although the latter works via the main imaging sensor, not a separate AF sensor module.
• Four lenses are launched with the V1 and the J1, with more under development. The four are the 10mm (27mm equivalent) pancake-style f/2.8, 10-30mm (27-81mm equivalent) f/3.5-5.6 VR (Vibration Reduction in-lens image stabilisation) kit zoom, 30-110mm (81-297mm eq.) f/3.8-5.6 VR, and last but not least the 10-100 (27-270mm eq.) f.4.5-5.6 VR PD-Zoom, which has a power zoom using a near-silent voice coil motor. All these lenses apart from the 10mm are retractable when not used.
• Both the V1 and J1 will go on sale on 20th October in the UK.

Comparing sensor sizes

Perhaps top of the debate about the Nikon 1 platform is the choice of sensor size. Many Nikon fans must face the reality that after criticising some rivals for using a sensor they felt was too small, like Micro Four Thirds, that the Nikon 1 sensor is even smaller, in fact only just over half the area of Four Thirds and less than a third of the area of APS-C sensors used in Nikon's DX DSLRs.

But Nikon has kept the sensor to 10 megapixels, which photographers in-the-know will not be concerned about. So the pixel pitch is not too bad at 3.4 micrometres - much better than compact cameras, although smaller than Micro Four Thirds 12MP sensors. As the sensor is most likely made by Sony, arguably the best sensor manufacturer in the world, there is still a chance that the Nikon 1 sensor may match or even out-perform the larger Micro Four Thirds sensors for dynamic range and noise performance in the lab. We'll just have to wait and see. But it will be harder to get larger sensor benefits, like low depth of field, and diffraction softening will be more problematical at brighter apertures.

Nikon is already cranking up the marketing machine for the 1 platform as was evident in London's Covent Garden today with this giant pair of hands holding aloft a huge white J1.

The 10-100mm (27-270mm equivalent) superzoom optimised with a silent voice-coil power zoom control is surprsingly large.

The Nikon J1 seen here fitted with its retractable 10-30mm (27-81mm equivalent) kit zoom, doesn't have a mechanical focal plane shutter.

So there's your starter - from today's launch. Below is our photo gallery from the launch event. Don't forget to let us know what you think of the news so far, either by emailing [email protected] or via the discussion forum thread linked to this article.

Launch event and hands-on gallery

Click on a thumbnail below get a larger view of the image.

To return to the thumbnail gallery, click the home arrow at the bottom of the page, or navigate forwards or backwards through the gallery using the backwards/forwards arrow buttons.

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