There is 'no such thing as a free lunch' when it comes to video. After my experiences with auto-everything hand-held, which wasn't succesful, even using a tripod and expecting the camera and lens to produce seamless footage without some work is not possible. I'm not convinced as yet by the rocker zooming switch, which seems 'jerky' (which could of course could be me!) and there is a fair amount of glitching in exposure and focus, which I hoped wouldn't be there with a 1'' sensor, but unfortunately it is.
The camera / lens combination does have complete manual control over focus and exposure though, so my next attempt will include setting everything manually. The Nikon 1 does allow manual focus with its lenses, even though they don't have a focusing ring. Selecting it brings up a magnified window and by turning the very small and fiddly control wheel you can have MF. Its not great. Unfortunately, the white dot focus confirmation system which comes into play when Nikon F lenses are fitted via the adapter doesn't cross over for the AF lenses.
Having said all that the footage is very nice to view and the zoom does a decent job.
For stills, it does seem that its marginally softer than the primes or any of the other zooms. This is pretty much the case for lenses of this type, which balance convenience with quality. I also noticed shooting these images that stopping the lens down actually worsens the image quality. f/8 onwards was distinctly soft. As I mentioned in a previous post, apparently these Nikon 1 lenses are optimised for wider apertures. I will be testing this out in due course.
A real positive yesterday was how easy it is to switch between video and stills shooting. You can take a full-resolution still while shooting video which doesn't interrupt the video footage which is very useful, but I had different settings for each, so shot each separately. This was really quick and easy to do and pretty much only involved moving a dial. This was useful since I was working in light which only gave me occasional and short-lived bursts of sunlight.
So still a learning experience with this lens and I feel that once I've got the hang of it, and it is different to what I'm used to, I will be be able to get better results. Its pretty good as it is, but there is more there, I'm sure.
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