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).
