Nikon Coolpix P1100 is my favorite all-in-one camera for birders

I dubbed the Nikon Coolpix P1100 my worst camera of 2025, only to claim that it was a guilty pleasure. And that’s because I secretly love this camera. As I explained in the article, the only grievance I have with it is that it’s – more or less – the same camera as the Nikon Coolpix P1000, with a USB-C port and a couple of very small upgrades. I want a proper successor to the most barmy bridge camera ever made, gosh darn it!

The reason I love the P1000 and P1100 is that they’re quite unlike anything else on the market: an all-in-one bridge camera with a whopping 125x zoom, resulting in an equivalent 24-3000mm zoom range. Oh, and you can double that with the digital zoom (although I wouldn’t recommend it).

Photography rivet counters (guilty!) will bemoan the small 1/2.3-in. type CMOS sensor, 16MP, and the AF (which really isn’t all that). But this isn’t the camera you purchase if you want to win Wildlife Photographer of the Year or carve out a career in wildlife photography. It’s a hobbyist's camera through and through. But more than that, it’s a casual hobbyist’s camera.

I’ve said many times before that the Nikon P1100 is a bit of an underrated gem for those individuals who aren’t photographers first. By that, I mean bird watchers, wildlife enthusiasts, and casual stargazers. If you want a one-and-done camera that doesn’t cost the Earth to record the birds that you see – not create visual masterpieces – I can hardly think of a better camera on the market. If you’re going on a once-in-a-lifetime safari and want to document the animals along the way, this camera is small enough to travel with and will get you close enough to the action.

The Nikon P1100 is the non-photographer’s camera. It’s a utilitarian tool that’s built for one thing: getting you close to your quarry. The sad thing is, I fear that it’s one of those cameras that only the hardcore photography fraternity really knows about…

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Want more content on Nikon's far-reaching bridge camera? I photographed the moon with a monster Nikon P1000 bridge camera. If you're looking for more of my ramblings on other Nikon cameras, the Nikon D800 is old, cheap and still takes gorgeous photos. And if you're looking for up-to-the-second camera tech, stay up to date with the latest camera news.