Nikon Coolpix P5100 (2007)
A 12.1-megapixel CCD compact that Nikon priced and pitched like a flagship. It mostly delivered, as long as you weren't in a hurry.
Overview
At £299.99 in the UK and about $400 in the States, the Coolpix P5100 was never a camera you bought by accident. Nikon placed it, in the words of one launch write-up, at "the very top of the range of seven new Nikon digital compact cameras". It was the flagship of a seven-camera compact push, meant to carry the Coolpix name into serious-enthusiast territory. The body is black. The sensor is a 1/1.72-inch CCD rated at 12.1 million effective pixels. The whole package was Nikon's attempt to put DSLR thinking into a pocket camera.
Popular Photography said the P5100 "boasts many features from the company's more advanced DSLR line." That's the pitch in one sentence, and it's why the camera still has a small, stubborn following nearly two decades on. The 12-megapixel figure, quoted as 12.2MP in some listings, put it at the top of the compact resolution race when it landed. The 1/1.72-inch CCD is also physically larger than what most compacts of the era carried. A bigger CCD with fewer pixels per square millimeter generally means cleaner files. CCDs of this generation earned a reputation for the way they render color and skin tones, a look since labeled "filmic" by people who have spent too much money on modern CMOS cameras trying to get back to it.
What the P5100 does not have is speed. Popular Photography's review was blunt: "its shot-to-shot performance leaves something to be desired." That's the trade-off built into the design. You get the resolution and the color, and you pay for it in write times and buffer behavior. The camera's rhythm is deliberate, not snappy.
Key Features
1/1.72-inch CCD at 12.1 Megapixels
The sensor is a 1/1.72-inch type CCD with 12.1 million effective pixels. That put it in rare company among 2007 compacts, most of which were fighting over smaller sensors and higher megapixel counts. The physical diagonal works out to roughly 9.3 mm, meaningfully larger than the 1/2.5-inch sensors that dominated the compact market at the time. More light-gathering area, less pixel crowding. One retrospective says the P5100 still "makes sense for street photography today" - not because it's fast, but because the files have a character that modern compact sensors don't replicate.
3.5x Optical Zoom with Vibration Reduction
The lens is a 3.5x optical zoom with Nikon's Vibration Reduction system, starting at 7.5 mm at the wide end. That's a modest zoom range, and 3.5x was unremarkable even in 2007. It still covers moderate wide to short telephoto, and the VR system helps at the long end where handshake becomes a real problem in low light. One user described the lens system as "nine primes in one," which is generous. Wide-angle and fisheye adapters are available for the camera, and at least one owner was actively experimenting with both.
2.5-inch LCD and 720p Video
The rear screen is a 2.5-inch LCD. That was standard for the class in 2007 and is small by modern standards, but usable. The camera also shoots 720p HD video, which was a genuine selling point at launch. The P5100 was part of the first wave of compacts where "it also does HD video" was a checkbox worth ticking.
DSLR-Derived Controls and In-Camera Editing
Nikon's marketing leaned hard on the DSLR connection, and it's not entirely hollow. The P5100 offers the manual control you'd expect from a flagship compact: the mode dial, the exposure options, the feel of a camera that expects you to know what you're doing. The in-camera editing suite is more consumer-grade: D-Lighting for brightening shadows, cropping, small-picture copies for email, and a black-border effect. D-Lighting works reasonably well on underexposed files, pulling detail out of dark areas without completely wrecking the tonality. It's not a substitute for getting it right in camera, but it's a useful fallback.
Historical Context
The P5100 was announced as part of a seven-camera Coolpix push, with availability "sometime in the Autumn of 2007" in the UK and a ship date of late September in the US. It sat at the top of that lineup. The lower-priced P50, a $250 model arriving in late October, handled the budget end of the range.
£299.99 in the UK and about $400 in the US put the P5100 firmly in enthusiast territory, competing with cameras that had larger sensors and faster processors. Nikon's bet was that the CCD's color rendering, the DSLR-derived controls, and the 12.1-megapixel resolution would justify the premium. For some buyers, they did. For others, the shot-to-shot speed was a dealbreaker.
Collectibility & Value
On the used market, the P5100 is too new to be a true vintage collectible and too old to be a practical daily carry for most people. It's still desirable enough among CCD enthusiasts that clean examples move. eBay listings regularly include complete cameras, such as "Nikon COOLPIX P5100 Black Digital Camera 12.1MP 3.5x Zoom CCD Bundle", alongside parts-only listings. So the camera has a following, and some of them have died. BuyBackWorld offers instant quotes for used P5100s.
The EN-EL5 battery is the key accessory to look for. It's a lithium-ion pack shared across a range of Coolpix models, so replacements and chargers are still available. The MH-61 charger is commonly listed as compatible. One Russian-language listing notes it fits the P5000, P5100, P80, P90 and others. Make sure a P5100 comes with a battery and a charger, or budget for both. A camera without a working EN-EL5 is a paperweight.
No sold-price data was available for this page, and no common failure points or repair guides surfaced in the research. The parts-only listings on eBay suggest that some units have failed, but there's no documented pattern to point to.
eBay Listings
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