Teaching others to use the V1

Last weekend at the karting shoot (see my previous post), I lent the V1 to a friend so he could give it a try. He's a Canon shooter and knows his stuff, and he has used Nikon bodies a few times.

But the UI of the V1 isn't the most convenient to use. I had to show him how to dig into the menu to switch between the exposure modes. I also had to explain how to adjust the shutter and aperture. Cycling through images was familiar to him as Canon also uses a thumbwheel.

I didn't realize (or I'd forgotten) how inconvenient it is to adjust settings on the V1 until I had to explain it to someone else. I can see how this was done to simplify the camera, but from the outset this was not a tyro's body (that would be the J1). Nikon realized their mistake and wisely changed that with the V2 and V3, but the V1 is stuck with the menu system.

On a side note, I love the thumb wheel for quickly finding the photo you want. Nikon needs to adopt this on ALL their bodies.

Once he had the camera set up the way he liked, he was a happy shooter. He did like the images he got using the V1, so score a point for the little camera.

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