Nikon Coolpix L18--Nice features, good pictures, inexpensive, but a little fragile

The Nikon Coolpix L18 is a decent quality camera great for casual picture taking. It has everything that you would expect in a modern digital point-and-shoot camera: SD card format, large screen, compact size. It is definitely a step up from my previous Nikon Coolpix 4300. I've been waiting to upgrade for a while now and when I saw this at costco online for $100, I jumped on it.

Unpacking the box, you will find the camera (of course), a quick start guide, an English manual, a Spanish manual, software CD, a USB cable, A/V cable for hooking up to your TV and two AA batteries--Yes, you read that correctly, it takes AA batteries.

This was one of the main reasons I got the camera. I hated having to lug around a charger (and foreign adaptor plugs) for my camera when I was on vacation. Inevitably, the batteries would die in the middle of the day and I'd miss a half day of picture taking. No more with this camera. No chargers and you can find AA batteries just about anywhere in the world.

Turning on the camera, the screen is large and uncluttered. It is perfectly adequate for framing a shot. The on-screen display tells you the mode you are shooting in, how many pictures you have left on your card, and the quality setting. There is also a focusing reticle in center of the screen, which, when the shutter button is pressed half way, turns green when the shot is in focus and the exposure and f-stop settings are displayed. If you are taking a portrait, the face focus indicator will also show which faces it is focusing on.

Pressing the mode button brings up a menu of the four main mode options available--Easy auto, auto, scene, and video. It seems that there is little difference between easy auto and auto, so these settings seem to be redundant. Missing is a manual mode that lets you specify exposure, f-stop, and ISO. This is partially remedied by an exposure compensator option.

The camera takes nice pictures. The pictures are crisp and the color rendering is good. The auto focus has facial recognition which works well if the subject is still and without glasses. Glasses seem to throw off the face focus, as well as fast moving toddlers. So far, I have found no way to turn off the face focus feature, except by going to scene setting.

One thing that I really like about the camera are the built-in "scene" settings. For instance, there are modes preset for portraits, landscapes, museum (a personal favorite--No flash, Anti-shake, and best shot selection to improve sharpness), and others. I do a lot of travelling to places where there are no flashes allowed and the museum setting still allows me to take good pictures. Another great scene feature is "Panorama." In this mode, the camera will overlay a portion of the last picture you took with the current view on the screen. This allows you to line up the current shot with the last in order to make a panorama later. I think this is a really great feature. I tend to make a few panoramas on each trip and many times I have undershot the scene with my old camera and was unable to stitch together the scene I wanted.

I suppose I should also mention that the camera can also take video with sound. I don't really find much use for this feature as this is a still camera-- plain and simple. The videos themselves are better than cell phone quality, but certainly not great. They tend to be grainy without great contrast.

In terms of capacity, I can get about 800 pictures (3264x2448--Normal quality) or 20 minutes video (NTSC) on a 2 GB card. The camera also has 21 MB of internal memory giving an extra 10 or so picture buffer for when your card fills up. Battery life is adequate, but not stellar. Moderate use over two days will drain a pair of alkalines.

I can't comment on the included software. It is windows/mac only, and I use linux.

This camera does have a few annoyances:

Firstly, this isn't really a problem for me, but this camera does not have a viewfinder. It only has the screen on the back. For those of you (40 and above, I've found in my experience) that want to put the camera up to your face to take a picture, this isn't the camera for you. Also, the buttons are, in my opinion, too small. In particular, the mode select and playback buttons. For those of us with fat finger syndrome, it'll be a challenge to press the buttons. I usually have to use my fingernail to depress the buttons. In this regard, my coolpix 4300 was much nicer with its wheel style mode selector. Also, the SD card sits behind the battery door. So if you need to change SD cards, the batteries also pop out. It takes a bit of force to put the batteries back in and close the door. It would have been much better to put the card slot on the side of the camera.

The big problem I ran into was what can only be described as a design flaw. After two days of having the camera, the lens jammed in the out position, which caused a "focus error" to appear on the screen. I hadn't mishandled the camera in any way--no drops, new batteries, only used indoors. After doing some research, it appears this is a major problem in the entire coolpix line and is due to weak focus motors. The fix for me was to turn the camera on and gently tap the base on a hard surface. However, it appears other people have not been so lucky and have had to return the camera for service. This little problem should not happen and it appears Nikon is aware of the problem, but is still releasing new models with the same problem. This is the reason that I am giving this camera 3 stars. It would have been a high four star camera for its combination of being inexpensive, taking AA batteries, good picture quality; but a broken camera is worthless and it gave me quite a scare.

It is a good camera for what it is: a point-and-shoot. It doesn't take professional quality pictures, nor is it very rugged, but it does have just enough options to keep the casual picture taker happy.

Update: I purchased a set of Durcell rechargeable 1800 mAh NiMH batteries for the camera (4 AA plus wall charger $14 at Kmart). Using these batteries with the camera and putting the camera in NiMH battery mode (as opposed to alkaline), I was able to shoot 300 pictures with one set of batteries. Not too bad. They blow the alkaline batteries out of the water.