There are two things that immediately strike you as you handle the Nikon CP4500 for the first time, namely that it's smaller and lighter than previous Nikon 9** cameras. Despite it's lightness, the body is of 100% alloy construction as against the 50-50 of the CP995. Although it's appearance and build is better than the CP995, it's black finish makes it a runner-up to the CP990 in terms of looks and to be honest it reminds me a bit of 'home-brew' electronics kits. Birders aren't particularly fashion conscious....so cosmetic appearances aren't number one on the shopping list.
The size reduction is a major boon to birders who are already laden down with a scope, tripod, binos. The CP4500 should fit in most pockets, even with a scope adapter left on.
Having praised it's compact size, holding the camera in a conventional manner (hand around the grip) was uncomfortable as my fingers now hit the lens part of the camera...my hands aren't large.
Power is courtesy of the same Nikon Li-ion battery as the CP995, battery consumption semed fair
Start-up time seemed slow, I noticed the delay....something I had never done with my CP990.
The lens mechanism purred like a cat instead of the familiar grating noise reminiscent of a gearbox about to die. Seemed more rapid at finding a focus lock than I'd previously experienced with the 4x lens of the CP995 and definitely better at getting a focus lock in bad light than my CP990.
In continuous shooting mode I took five consecutive shots in about 4 seconds and the write time (Lexar 128mb 12x) was about 13 seconds....images were all about 1.38mb.
Although I can't measure the shutter-lag time....it didn't appear very good. Camera start-up time was also a bit slow, about 6 seconds when the zoom is set in 'last position'.
As for image quality with the CP4500, I'm starting to be extremely impressed with the results. Initially I was quite disturbed to see the images looking so soft in the camera's review mode. When opened up in Photoshop, the images still looked a bit soft. Fortunately the higher res images of the CP4500 withstand a large amount of unsharp-mask and the end results are now looking better than those from my cp990, capturing thin objects like pine needles far better.
The colours look far better out of the camera than my Nikon 990, though the images looked too contrasty at times with some burn-out, I suggest turning the contrast setting down to minimum.
The file sizes of the 'Fine' Jpegs looks small considering it's a 4mp camera, this is due to the fact that the images contain far less 'noise'.....switch to iso400 and see how big the files are.
My views on the cp4500 are still positive after 18 months of use. The quality of image available from the camera is superior to the cp990 & cp995, the ability to resolve the finest detail is the most obvious benefit. The cp4500's speed of use for digiscoping (time from off to taking a shot) is a problem for many users, though just switching the monitor off and on is the best way for speed of use.
I have had the feeling that the percentage of 'keepers' is slighlty less than with the cp990, though I suspect that is a result of being greedy with the camera zoom and taking too many shots with the zoom at close to maximum, rather than closer to 3x (which I feel produces the better results.
A big bonus is the quality of the cp4500 at iso200, even reasonable quality prints can be made from the results at this setting (after some work in Photoshop)..... iso200 on the cp990 was pretty much useless for anything other than web images.
Without an external power supply for the cp4500, my views would have been less positive as far as convenience of use.... I do not rate the Li-ion batteries at all, rapid charging doesn't make up for their rapid exhaustion.
