It's a shame this camera isn't getting more exposure! I know the vaunted Sony RX100 line is probably the most popular standard bearer at this class (yes, I know it doesn’t have interchangeable lenses, more on that later), but NIkon has finally gotten it right with this one! Up front, I will disclaim that I am NOT a professional, not even an amateur photographer by most accounts. I did decide to upgrade from smartphone though a few years back, and got the Nikon J1. My conditions were picture / image quality obviously, size (travel friendly), and price. Generally speaking, the J1 was bad in terms of balancing those 3. After some time passed, it made up for it with a very reduced price, which is when I got it. The thing was way better than most point and shoots, and better than smartphones, but way behind the competition. It's a good thing I got it cheap just to try out the world of "real" cameras. I upgraded and added the 18.5mm f/1.8 lens that I shot with exclusively, which bumped up the J1 to the pro-sumer tier for me. It was still lacking some ease of use features, and of course resolution and image quality were not as good as they could have been. I bought a Sony RX100 Mark 3 at the same time for work (corporate card hehe), so was measuring the J1 up to the flagship device of that size and class, and it wasn’t. Well, then along came the J5, and it definitely caught my eye:
Form – The entire point of using the smartphone cameras was due to convenience and travelability/size. This was an important criteria when I chose the Nikon 1 series; a camera is no good if it’s not with you because you don’t want to bus around 20lbs. of gear! The J5 is a tiny bit bigger (I think), insignificantly so, I don’t notice enough to change it on my scale of packability/travel. In summary, the Nikon 1 series always scored well and ranked up there with the competition for this category, and the J5 was no different. It looks fine too, got the new trend of retro looking body style, which I’m general neutral about.
Function – The J5 is superior in every way to the J1 in terms of operating it as a pro-sumer camera. The aperture, shutter, exposure, and ISO are all far more accessible and easily changed on the fly for each picture, which allows me to actually start learning about photography and getting the most from the hundreds of dollars I paid rather than leaving it on auto. The sensor got some upgrades, and at 1” it’s not the biggest (but far more travel friendly) mirrorless interchangeable, but far more than sufficient for my purposes. No complaints at all, and I can guarantee you that with my 18.5mm lens I couldn’t tell you the difference between a 4/3 sensor and mine by looking at a picture. I get far superior results than pretty much any of my friends without DSLR’s, which is all that matters .
Image Quality – This is what all the improvements are leading up to. I can’t describe the improvement in technical terms, and probably don’t need to as there are tons of resources available from other reviews and websites, but I can describe it in layman terms: WOW. I’m blown away, and can’t begin to describe the results on my pretty subjective non-photographer level. In comparison to that RX100 Mark 3 now, it is superior, but I can only say this WITH the 18.5mm lens which is about another $200. Key is, this camera is a platform, and can still be further upgraded such as with the f/1.2 32mm lens that supposedly jumps this camera to a whole other tier, also the 10mm pancake lens that makes even more packable, but retains image quality. The Sony lacks that flexibility, and nobody wants to pay $800 to upgrade to the next Mark 4 (sales are poor) when it’s just a small incremental improvement. I’ve written enough, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

My expectations have been exceeded. This is the 2nd mirrorless camera I tried. I did try the Sony a6000 1st, and it was OK, but seemed the colors were not true and even with the white balance at higher temperatures it still looked too cool. The 1j5 however has nice true colors. The controls and menu are very easy to use and once you have set up the wifi (on iPhone at least) it is very easy and has a fast response. The raw files are not supported in lightroom yet which is the norm for any new model camera that comes out, so I am shooting jpeg for now and with that I went back to using aperture priority and adjusting the exposure with exposure compensation (since I can't fix any of my booboo's yet). The butterfly was shot with aperture priority at 5.6, I had the picture set for vivid. My other cameras are a d3300 and d610 which are both awesome cameras in there own way. I got the 1 j5 for the small form factor and light weight, I bought the 10-100mm separate from this kit and that is the lens I am using. I did notice a potential problem in regards to over heating, as when the camera is on and shooting for a long time (45 mins or so) there is a white hot spot that shows up in the bottom right corner, once the camera cools down again it goes away. I just need to keep that in mind and if i plan on doing a whole lot of shooting pick up one of the dslr's. I have ordered the ft1 adapter so that I can use the 28-300 lens on it to get a reach of 810mm. All in all very pleased with this little cutie!