Full Review

Coming from a company that’s been making some fine SLRs for what seems like eons now, the Coolpix L20 is a point and shoot camera with a value for money offering. If your usage is mostly outdoors (vacation photos, for instance) the L20 does a good job. When light is low indoors, the camera boosts the ISO and the results are very telling – noise as well as blurriness. The large 3-inch screen (the largest amongst our crop of Top 5) is bright and is usable outdoors unless harsh sunlight is directly incident on it. The camera seems to be designed to be idiot-proof (which can be a good and a bad thing as well) – the controls are so basic that even ISO is not user selectable – something that even cell phone cameras allow users to select. On the plus side, the EV setting (to compensate for under / overexposure) is just a one-button function – part of the 5-way D-pad. Self-timer (10s), flash modes and macro mode are other functions available from the D-pad. A ‘mode’ button lets you select Auto, ‘Easy Auto’, ‘Scene’ modes and Video. Speaking of the video mode, quality is good (though not in the league of Canon’s uncompressed MJPEG files) and while the scene changes, the L20 quickly changes metering to suit the scene. The file size is kept in check with a 4Mbps bitrate – we wish Nikon had upped this to give even better quality, given that file sizes should not be a concern with SD cards being very cheap. Though the Coolpix L20 seems good value, it is ousted by the cheaper Kodak that has similar offering.

Bottom Line

With a large 3-inch screen and a 3.6x optical zoom this would have been an able competitor to models ranked higher in our charts, if only its overall performance was a notch or two higher. Its dedicated button for cycling through Auto, Movie mode and Scene mode will be appreciated by people looking for simplicity.