But no. Nothing so simple or straightforward as that.

The first of the four modes is “Motion Snapshot”. The camera takes a half-second or so of video followed by a still. OK, possibly useful. But that’s not all. You have to press the F button and choose a “Theme” for the motion snapshot – “Beauty”, “Waves”, “Relaxation”, or “Tenderness”. (I’m not joking.) The only difference between the four “themes” is which cheesy pre-canned musical “theme” it will stick on the audio track of the half-second of video – which gets played back at about 1/5th speed. WTF?

As for the controls, in Manual the up/down toggle controls shutter speed and the wheel controls aperture. The ISO gain can’t be adjusted at all except in a menu. OK. But in Aperture-priority, the up/down toggle controls aperture and the wheel does nothing. Huh? In Shutter-priority, it’s just the opposite – up/down controls shutter speed and the wheel does nothing.

Could this possibly be more inconsistent and impossible to learn? Did Nikon give any thought at all to the poor user?

The second mode is “Smart Photo Selector”. When you press the shutter it takes a bunch of pictures (they don’t say how many), and it picks the best five and saves them (they don’t say how it picks them). Everything is fully automatic, you can’t control aperture, shutter speed, ISO gain, or focus at all. I’m surprised they let you decide when to take the picture – it really ought to just have you wave the camera around until it sees something “pretty” and decides for itself when to shoot. The F button doesn’t do anything in this mode. This is the ultimate “point and shoot” mode. I suppose it might be useful for some people, but not for me.

The third mode is a useful still-picture mode. Exposure control is the same dog’s breakfast as in Motion Snapshot. Here the F button does something useful – press it and the up/down toggle chooses between “Single frame”, “Continuous” (5 fps), or “Electronic” shutter mode. But to choose whether the electronic mode will do 10, 30, or 60 frames/second (which is great until the buffer fills up after just 28 frames, as mentioned), you have to go into the menu. WTF? There are only 5 modes – single, 5, 10, 30, or 60 frames/sec. Why the heck can’t they just let you choose from all 5 modes with the up/down toggle? This stuff makes me want to pull my hair out!

The fourth and last mode is for video recording. A great thing here is the camera offers full manual control in video mode – you can adjust aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to taste. Press the F button and the up/down toggle lets you choose “HD” video or “Slow motion” (really, high frame rate). But there are 3 “HD” modes (1080i/60, 1080p/30, and 720p/60) and 2 “slow motion” modes (400 and 1200 frames/second). And just as with the frame rate for stills, you have to go into the menu and choose one of each. There are only 5 modes here – why don’t they let you choose all 5 and skip the menu? Sheer incompetence of the UI designer is all I can think of.

The video bitrate is only 16 Mbps in 720p/60 mode, which is really too low for good quality. Still frames from 720p video show horrible muddy artifacts in areas of motion. The bitrate is 24 Mbps for the 1080 modes; I haven’t tried it to see if it looks better; I want the 720p/60 mode for the 60 progressive frames/second.

In the video mode, both the shutter button and the video start/stop button work – you can take a still anytime, regardless of whether or not you’re recording video. But this is the case only in the video mode. In all the other modes pressing the video button does nothing – the camera gives an error message if you press it. So what is the point of have separate shutter and video buttons if you can’t press either one and get what you wanted? And if they can make them both work in the video mode, why can’t they do the same in the other modes? Arrgh!! ! !! More hair lost.

OTHER THINGS ON MY WISH LIST

The J1/V1 could have been a really fantastic, breakthrough camera, but Nikon blew the opportunity. The hardware is there (except for buffer RAM), but the firmware is actively fighting the user every step of the way.

Despite that, I’m keeping it, at least until something better comes along. It can do things no other camera can.

There are a few other things I wish Nikon had included to make it better – none of them would have been difficult:

• A tilt-and-swivel screen, similar to the Nikon D5100. The V1 has an EVF, but the J1 has no viewfinder of any kind – not even a cheap optical tunnel like on the Canon G1X. I’m going to mostly use this camera on a tripod, but how are you supposed to use it handheld? With a tilt-and-swivel screen, you could nestle it against your belly (Hasselblad style) for a steady view. I’d prefer this to a viewfinder of any kind.

• Optional cropping of video from the center of the sensor, ala the Panasonic GH2’s “ETC” and “Movie Crop”  mode on the Canon 60D. I wish every digicam had this for video; if you could make the full-resolution video (1080, 720, whatever) come from a selectable area of the sensor, you could adjust for the limited image circles of unusual lenses. Cropping stills is easy; with video you lose a lot of resolution doing it in post.

• A removable (or external) IR filter. There are times when it would be interesting to shoot in the IR or UV bands, but the fixed filter in front of the sensor makes this impossible. Nikon’s filter is stronger than Canon’s – I can see the IR LEDs of my remote controls on my Canon G11, but I can’t see a thing on the J1. With the small lenses used by the J1/V1, an external IR filter on the front (or back) of each lens (when you want it) wouldn’t be a big burden.

• A built-in GPS for automatic geotagging of images.

• A VGA video mode (640×480) at 120 frames/second, and a QVGA mode (320×240) at 240 frames/second. There is too large a gap in frame rate between the ones offered in video mode (30, 60, 400, or 1200 fps).

• Pre-trigger of high frame rate capture (both still and video). The Casio Exilim cameras have done this for years – it’s easy to implement, and would make the high speed capabilities of this camera far more useful. Casio runs the sensor at full speed as soon as you half-press the shutter, running the data through the buffer. When you fully press the shutter, the previous few dozen frames in the buffer get saved together with new frames as they’re captured. So when you press the shutter as soon as some event happens, your video starts a little bit before the event, instead of a little too late. [Edit: The J1 actually does this in Motion Snapshot mode – it stores video from about 1/2 second before the shutter press until about 1/2 second after. Which makes it all the more frustrating that Nikon doesn’t offer this in the other modes.]

WRAP-UP

Enough ranting. Here’s my summary:

I love the hardware capabilities of this camera, but find it difficult to fathom the depths of Nikon’s stupidity in failing to exploit them.

They are offering a unique camera with capabilities no competitor can touch, yet they go out of their way to cripple it to make those capabilities difficult or impossible to use. That might be understandable if they offered a higher-priced un-crippled model, but they don’t.

Some will say “wait – Nikon designed this camera as a shiny fashion accessory for yuppies with more money than brains, not for photographers or nerds into high-speed photography”. That may be true. But it wouldn’t cost Nikon a penny extra to not disable the focus assist mode and light meter, or implement a UI that didn’t make things difficult for no reason at all. Then they could have sold the camera to photographers and nerds in addition to brainless yuppies. So I still call it stupidity.

Perhaps the market agrees – the photo manager at my local Best Buy told me she hasn’t sold a single Nikon 1 camera since Christmas (this was in April!).

Please – try harder next time, Nikon.