Nikon COOLPIX L10

Till a few months back, a 2-3 MP camera was considered more-than-enough for shutterbugs on a budget. But with most major players coming up with good 5 MP (or above) cameras, the standard for a budget camera has come up like never before.

Today, we review the COOLPIX L10, one of Nikon's latest additions to their 'Life' series. It's a decent sized (meaning CCD capacity) budget camera that promises to deliver good quality images and movies for those with a slightly lower budget than most.

The Nikon L10 features a 1/2.5-inch CCD that can capture up to 5.05 million pixels (approx). It sports a 6.2-18.6 mm Nikkor lens that has 3x optical zoom. The camera also has a 4x digital zoom function and a 2-inch 153K pixel resolution screen LCD.

All this is crammed into a plastic case that measures just 89.5 x 60.5 x 26 mm (l x b x d), and the curvy body with the metallic paint job make it look heavier than the 115 grams that it weighs.

It also has a few Nikon-special features like D-Lighting, Best Shot Selector (BSS) mode, Red-Eye Fix, and Face-Priority AF.

Other features include an ISO range from 64 - 800, 7MB of built-in memory, an SD/MMC card slot for expansion, as well as USB and NTSC / PAL video-out ports. The L10 uses two standard AA batteries for power.