Nikon Coolpix L120

The front of the L120 is dominated by the large lens, even when it sits retracted into its housing, although commendably it's no larger than the L110's 15x optic. Upon power-up, the lens extends, provided you have not forgotten to remove the lens cap beforehand. If you have, you will not only need to remove it but also to power the camera off and on again, unless you quickly remove it within a couple of seconds, whereupon the lens extends as normal. The L120's lens is not terribly fast in terms of its maximum aperture, which is f/3.1 at wide angle and f/5.8 at the telephoto end. The focal  range, on the other hand, commands respect, starting at 4.5mm (equivalent to 25mm) and going all the way to 94.5mm (equivalent to 525mm).

 The other rear-panel controls are the same as the ones found on the L110, including a Shooting Mode and a Playback button, a standard four-way navigation pad, plus the indispensable Menu and Delete buttons. The navigation buttons give quick access to four oft-used functions, which thankfully include exposure compensation. The other three are the macro, self-timer and flash modes, although as noted earlier, you have to manually raise the flash in order to be able to use the latter. A centred OK button is used to confirm changes to settings. You can switch from Playback to Record mode simply by lightly tapping the shutter release, so you don't have to use the dedicated Shooting Mode button (although you can if you want to).

One of the more interesting features of the Nikon Coolpix L110 is the Sport Continuous shooting mode. The highest selectable resolution is restricted to three megapixels, but you can shoot at a speed of up to 15 frames per second for up to 20 frames in a row. This can be helpful with capturing fast motion, although we found that focus tracking does not work in this mode, meaning your subject may go out of focus if its distance to the camera changes while it moves.

A number of other continuous shooting options are available in Auto mode. At full resolution, the camera can take up to 19 frames at a rate of about 0.7fps. In addition to that, the L120 also features Nikon's Best Shot Selector (BSS) and Multi-shot 16 modes. The former automatically chooses the sharpest of up to 10 photos taken in succession with the shutter release held down, while the latter involves taking 16 shots at approximately 22fps and arranging them into a single 5-megapixel image.

Like the L110, the L120 has a Smile mode in which the camera hunts for smiling faces and fires off a shot whenever it detects one, without user intervention. After the photo is taken, both face and smile detection resume, so that the camera can take more shots of smiling people. Do note though that if the flash is raised, you cannot take another shot until it is fully recharged.

The Nikon Coolpix L120 provides a rather limited scope of editing functions in Playback mode. These include D-lighting and resizing. D-lighting lifts the shadows in a picture of a contrasty scene without affecting the highlights - head to the Image Quality section for a demonstration. On the L120, it is strictly a post-capture thing - this camera does not offer the Active D-lighting function of Nikon's DSLRs. The L120 still annoyingly lacks both a live and post-capture histogram.

This concludes our evaluation of the ergonomics, handling and feature set of the Nikon Coolpix L120. Let's move on to the image quality assessment.