Can you add a fisheye lens to the Nikon P500 and does that camera have a manual focus option?

The Nikon Coolpix P500 is a great camera to suit my needs. However, I wanted to know if you can add different lenses such as a fish eye? And also just wanted to know more about the manual focusing capabilities of this camera

Thanks

Answer:

The Nikon P500 is a very good camera, but it is a fixed lens camera meaning that like other superzoom cameras you cannot switch lenses like you can on a mirror-less interchangeable lens camera (MILC) or a digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR). This means you do not have the ability to easily add a true fisheye lens or some other type of lens to the camera.

However, the Nikon does feature an in-camera digital filter setting called “fisheye” that simulates the effect a fisheye lens produces. Again this is not the same as using a true fisheye lens but is supposed to digitally reproduce a “fisheye” effect similar to what you would get when using a regular fisheye lens. This special digital filter is easy to use and is one of five special filter modes you can select in the Nikon P500 menu. The five digital filter modes built into the Nikon P500 are soft, selective color, cross-screen, fisheye and miniature effect. They are covered on page 152 of the owner’s manual.

There are also some aftermarket companies that make screw-on lens adaptors for cameras such as the Nikon P500. Using adapter tubes or screwing into the filter threads on the lens when available, these after-market adaptors include teleconverters designed to increase the zoom capacity often between 1.4X to 2.0X and fisheye adaptors among others. If you desire to try to create a fisheye effect optically instead of using the built-in the digital filter you can find an aftermarket fisheye adapter online that can be added to the P500 camera lens. While I normally do not recommend these types of aftermarket adapters they are readily available online and can produce some creative effects. Even though they are not a true fisheye lens either the built-in digital filter or an aftermarket lens adapter could provide you with a fisheye type effect on your Nikon P500.

the manual focusing capabilities of the Nikon P500, have the ability to focus manually when you are shooting in the right mode. Manual focus is available on the Nikon P500 when using the program auto mode, shutter priority mode, aperture priority mode, manual mode, user setting mode or the sports scene mode. When using one of the supported modes you press the “macro” or “focus mode” button on the cameras Multi-Selector dial and choose the manual focus mode from the menu. You then use the up and down function on the Multi-Selector dial to adjust the focus. Once the focus has been adjusted you press the “OK” button to lock the focus at which time you can continue shooting with the focus locked at that specific setting. While the Nikon P500 does have the ability to focus manually the manual focus mode is kind of quirky when compared to the manual focus modes on some other cameras.

About papixelhub

Hi there, I’m Prem Amrit ! I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Patna, India. I founded my own digital agency, where I help SMBs leverage social media, SEO, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business. I started Papixelhub in 2019 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other solopreneurs with all the right information they needed to launch a successful business.