The only drawback is that I found it too easy to lock the lens when trying to zoom to its widest field of view. Like the lenses of Olympus Pen cameras, the Nikon lens locks when it is retracted, and you must unlock it again before the camera will operate. If you don't get the hang of the procedure, it may make you miss a shot.

Unlike the V1, the J1 doesn't accommodate an external flash, although it should operate as a master and trigger a small third-party flash attached via the tripod mount. Unfortunately, I didn't discover the J1's flash-compensation option until after I tried to use the tiny pop-up flash as a fill flash. The specs indicate that the flash can reach up to 16 feet at ISO 100, but that didn't seem to be the case in my trials. Next time I'll bump up the flash intensity via the menu.

In addition to the J1's 71-point autofocus system, Nikon touts very fast autofocus, thanks to a hybrid autofocus system that switches between phase-detection and contrast-detection AF, depending on the lighting conditions. In low light, the camera uses contrast detection, because it activates an AF illuminator lamp.

True to Nikon's claims, the autofocus is generally pretty fast. Unfortunately, during the test shoot it sometimes locked AF in the wrong place, but I have to say that most of my shots were sharply focused. Face detection worked fairly well when I stepped closer to the models, and it kept the face-detection brackets on a model's face even when I moved the camera.

Continuous shooting starts at 5 frames per second at full resolution, and can zip along as fast as 60 frames per second when you use the camera's Electronic Hi mode. The Smart Photo Selector, similar to Nikon's Best Shot Selector, captures a burst of up to 20 frames and then saves the five best based on various criteria, including exposure and facial recognition.