Initial Impressions - not great.

After reading some initial reviews, I foolishly bought this to replace my Nikon D3200 with mega-budget 70-300 Tamron. After many years of photography, this is the first time in my life I ran out and bought a new camera just released on the market - I was so excited. Unfortunately, after an hour of intensive shooting, I'll be sending the pricey £500 P900 back asap without any hesitation, and buying a 150-600mm Tamron with all that money I've just saved myself (after I find another £200 down the back of the sofa). If you really want a P900, I'd wait, they should depreciate quickly after the novelty wears off.

I hate to say this but overall the P900 has terrible image quality, to the point of looking like a cartoon or watercolour, though I appreciate it is a very tiny sensor. Basically, it's a £500 toy camera, and my basic, but remarkable 24MP D3200 body (probably worth £120 now) utterly blows it out of the water with image quality, though of course with the £50 Tamron 70-300mm my zoom range is extremely limited compared to the P900. However, with a 150-600 & 1.5x crop factor, I'll have a 900mm FF equivalent, and the D3200s aps-c sensor looks like medium format compared to the tiny flake inside the P900.

I had a Pentax K5 with Sigma 150-500 (not bad, great handheld), and actually had an old Nikkor 600mm 5.6 on the D3200 - a manual beast that was difficult to focus, mainly due to inherently paper thin DOF.

Anyway, P900 good points are easy to list:

- generally focuses quickly in bright light (BUT see below)

- image stabilisation is very impressive

- If you can't hold a telephoto lens, this is much lighter, but given the small grip and relatively long lens, it's actually not very comfortable to hold for long periods! I'd just as soon carry a DSLR+150-500 or 150-600 around and spend my time getting decent shots instead.

P900 Bad:

- Very difficult to capture anything moving beyond a snail's pace - you won't have many keepers.

-Forget zooming in and out on subjects, unless they are nailed to the ground. Way too slow & fiddly -which means perpetually hunting for the subject close to the 2000mm mark (let's face it, the main reason you would buy this camera)

- Misfocuses completely sometimes, even repeatedly shooting same high contrast subject

- Tiny, tiny viewfinder is virtually useless with eyeglasses outside. Have to hold other hand over top of camera. If you have contact lenses, wear them instead!! (or rather don't buy the camera)

- Skips all around with image stabilisation, making it hard to track anything

- Again, extremely slow (zoom, shutter lag, everything except focus). You can change a tyre before it fully zooms in or out. Take a photo looking through the viewfinder, and it replays it while your subject disappears before you can get another shot off. Maybe you can turn this off, but I'm not even going to bother. It's going straight back in the box.

- WORST of all is image quality. At ISO100 on a tripod, bright sunny day, noise reduction on lowest setting, shots still look like a cartoon. Don't even think about cropping. Good perhaps for posting casual uncropped shots on facebook or webpages, that's about it in my opinion.

Shame, because the image stabilisation is outstanding, and yes, you can zoom in on things very far away - there just isn't any point if the image looks absolutely awful! I imagine a 150-600 on aps-c will have much, much better image quality, plus all the inherent advantages of a speedier, easy to zoom DSLR, so that's where my money is going.