Labs

Although it only costs £136, we have a few bones to pick with the Coolpix L2. For a start, it has an all-plastic body, which looks cheap because of the smooth finish and marks easily. Then there's the lack of a rechargeable battery - it comes with two alkaline AAs. Considering Sony's DSC-W50 is virtually all metal and includes a lithium-ion battery for £3 more, the L2 has a lot of ground to make up elsewhere.

The Nikkor 3x zoom lens and 6-megapixel sensor are par for the course and mean the L2 has a top resolution of 2,816 x 2,112 - plenty for up to A4-sized photos. Also, the Coolpix is able to shoot QuickTime videos with a smooth 30fps frame rate at TV quality (640 x 480).

The quality of movies clips wasn't the best and neither was the audio, but there wasn't too much noise even in dim indoor conditions. A continuous focusing mode is welcome, but the loud clicking noise of the AF

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system ruins clips.

If you can look past the oversharpening and oversaturation of colours in still images, the L2 is a reasonable outdoor performer. We saw no noise or chromatic aberrations and few compression artefacts. However, viewing images next to the Ixus 60's showed that the Nikon can't compete with it for overall quality.

Indoors, however, it produced the best image on test. It nailed the white balance and, in addition to quick focusing, the oversharpening led to great resolution. With the lack of noise and perfect exposure, it beat more expensive cameras. But without a tripod and with the flash, the L2 tended to underexpose images.

White balance wasn't so good in our night shot, but the L2 produced a noise-free and "relatively" sharp photo. We say relatively because even on a tripod, a blur warning appeared and the left-hand corner was blurred, suggesting a less-than-perfect lens. The macro test is where Nikon cameras tend to fare well, but the L2 can't focus particularly close and could only capture a large area of 260 x 195mm.

The Coolpix loses out in other areas too. It has the smallest TFT on test - 2in with only 86,000 pixels - and no optical viewfinder. And it doesn't support Hi-speed USB 2; Full-speed USB 2 is the same speed as USB 1.1.

With a lack of shooting controls (no focus options, no manual ISO selection and no spot metering) the L2 lags way behind the Sony overall. If your budget is tight, the DSC-W50 is the one to choose.