Product Reviews

We didn't have room to include the Coolpix L11 in last month's budget camera Labs, but its cheaper sibling, the £66 L10, performed superbly. The L11 takes 6- rather than 5-megapixel images and its screen is bigger at 2.4in, although the 115,000-pixel screen resolution is lower than the L10's 2in, 153,000-pixel screen. The curved plastic design is more cuddly than stylish, but it's compact, light and seems durable.

Photographic options are understandably basic, with no ISO control or metering modes, but we were pleased to see that white balance presets and a manual mode are included. Performance is up to

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scratch, taking three seconds to shoot from startup and just over two seconds between subsequent shots. Focus could be quicker, though, particularly at telephoto zoom settings where it sometimes took repeated attempts to focus at all.

We tested the L11's image quality alongside the cameras in last month's Labs round-up. Detail was unremarkable, with a slight softness to images compared to the frontrunners, although not enough to cause serious concern. The 15cm closest macro focus was pretty disappointing, though. Colour accuracy, however, was the best of all the cameras on test, with consistently accurate hues and excellent automatic exposures. The only exception was in dim artificial lighting, where white balance presets were required for best results. Best of all was noise, or lack of it: photos shot in low light were a little blotchy, but less so than we're used to seeing, especially at this price. The camera varied its ISO speed automatically from 64 to 800, choosing sensible settings that didn't make us wish for a manual control.

Nikon's L11 doesn't have that extra-special something to match the five-star cameras in last month's Labs, but it's friendly, dependable and affordable.