For my 15 year service award at work I got to pick from a catalog of gifts. Most of the stuff was in the $300 dollar range. A lot of it was overpriced rubbish, but they had a Nikon B500. I figured since my Nikon D5000 is almost 10 years old, it was time for a new one.

Too bad this camera is kind of junk. It's not a DSLR, it’s a point and shoot. It only saves images as jpegs (and not RAW) and they are very lossy. Kind of crappy quality despite being 16MP. I have to say I’m very disappointed with it. The one thing that attracted me to it was that it has a 40X zoom.

Although it's a point-and-shoot, I figured a brand new $300 point-and-shoot with cool features like WiFi and Bluetooth would be able to somewhat compete with a 10-year old DSLR. I was wrong.









Another thing that really bothers me about this camera is that it runs off AAs. What a pain it is to make sure you always have a handful of batteries around instead of a pair of rechargeables that you can rotate. Sure, you can get rechargeable AAs, but what a pain it is to have to deal with four of them instead of the one battery my D5000 takes.

This camera comes with built in WiFi, and they really want you to use it. They put the SD card in where the batteries go. What a pain it is to have to keep taking the SD card out to unload images. The batteries pop up out of the slots when you slide the cover off. You have to lay that camera upside down to stop the batteries from falling out or close the cover again. On the D5000, there's a small dedicated door on the side of the camera just for the SD card.

The camera saves files with a whopping resolution of 4608 x 3456. I cropped them down to 680 x 452 for the blog so you'll just have to take my word for it when I say the images look like crap at full resolution on a 27" monitor.

Here's a closeup of some ornaments with my D5000. Not the greatest light in the living room, but a pretty descent image with a crystal clear view of the statues.



Here's the B500. Horrible. The colors are all wrong and it's very pixelated. No depth at all.



I took the camera outside, and although the weather is a little crappy, the D5000 took a pretty clear shot of the shed. You can zoom all the way in and there's still a lot of detail throughout the whole image.



Here's the B500. OK, that's not too bad. Again, this image was shrunk all the way down. The colors are still a little weird, but not terrible.



The whole thing falls apart as soon as you zoom in on the image. Here's the D5000. I cropped the image way down to 680 x 452 to just the box that's sitting in the window. A little pixelated, but not bad considering this image was 4288 x 2848 to start with.



The B500 is a mess.



Maybe the 40X zoom will be the redeeming quality that makes this camera a keeper. As luck would have it, the moon was out.

It is pretty cool that you can zoom in this far on the moon, but the quality is utter crap. There's zero detail in the images and everything is washed out. I had to put the camera on a tripod because it is impossible to take a picture of anything that far away and not end up with a totally blurry image.



For comparison, this is as far as can zoom in with my D5000's 300mm lens.



So I'm not impressed. At this point, I'd rather flip this $300 camera on eBay and buy another lens for my D5000.