Nikon Coolpix L20 10MP Digital Camera with 3.6 Optical Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Deep Red) Right now

This is a professional camera capable of crystal clear prints worthy of publication or gallery display, up to 16x20.

And it is incredibly inexpensive for a camera of such value.

Ok, so its 3.6 optical zoom won't pick sand off an eagle's beak at a thousand yards. Okay, so it won't blow up to billboard size without loss of definition. In the real world however and everyday use this is a fine and professional level camera that will do a far better job than you expected. Better than a cell-phone.

Disguised as a point and shoot. That's what makes it very effective; people are not intimidated by it. You can get right up to them, and it looks like any other camera. Yet, it is more.

In fact, the generous three inch LCD screen means you do not have to hold it to your face. There is no optical viewfinder in any case. So you can hold it at your hip and glance down at it to compose, and snap shots while engaging the subject in small talk comfortably. I have done this effectively with Tarahumara Indian children in northern Chihuahua who normally run quickly from any camera. It works, and came out great. And that large LCD screen has a high-contrast, anti-reflection coating which keeps it clear even in strong sunlight.

This camera is an improvement over the earlier, wonderful Coolpix, such as the great 8 megapix Nikon Coolpix L18 8MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Ruby Red) mainly because it has ten megapix capability. The earlier accessories such as the AC adapter, the Nikon EH-65A AC Adapter, are transferable if you have a long shoot to do in one place (like a schoolful of children, which I have done) or other reason to go off-battery. Nevertheless, a pair of Energizer® e²® "AA" Lithium Batteries For digital cameras, portable audio players, and more last in here last forever.

Your old Coolpix camera pouch also still fits; use it and protect your investment. I like the Rokinon Compact Digital Camera Padded Carrying Case for Canon Powershot, Casio Exilim, Fuji Finepix, (GE) General Electric, Kodak EasyShare, Nikon Coolpix, Olympus FE Stylus, Panasonic Lumix, Pentax Optio, Sony CyberShot and Samsung Digital Cameras.

Also new here, aside from the greater megapixels, is the new Expeed image processing system specially fine-tuned for the Coolpix series "to render natural-looking pictures of incredible quality and quick response" as if the earlier system of digital processing was not fine enough! Amateur enthusiasts will find their photos reaching a new magnitude of quality; even the professional will leave his camera bag and lenses at home (okay, so she might miss her long lens, but macro here gets in to two inches).

The ISO settings are phenomenal, stretching from 64 ISO all the way out to 1600. Over twenty years ago when I was doing photo-journalism in Nicaragua, we used 64 for our slide film and 1600 was just coming on the horizon, very grainy but with a special charm for low light situations, like oil lamp, etc. Here you can do very low light and candlelight (if you do not mind some grain effect), and in fact there are special pre-sets which employ the faster ISO's effectively.

This is another expansion over the prior Coolpix L series. You can choose instead of Auto (with own its user-selected options) to use the pre-set "Scene" selections quickly and efficiently. The Scene modes now include: Portrait, Night Portrait, Sports, Landscape, Party, Beach/Snow, Sunset, Dusk/Dawn, Night Landscape, Museum, Fireworks Show, Close Up, Copy, Back Light, Panorama Assist, Food. Food is one of the new ones, and you food photo-journalists might want to try it very inexpensively yet quite well here. The rest of the modes you can figure how they are set from the title and how you might apply their settings to similar situations; know that the Nikon impression of party might be much more sedate and candle-lit than the Animal House idea. This is not cheating, to use pre-sets; this is using the tool that you have in the way it was designed. Cheating would be setting this to its auto-scene setting in which it selects the Scene mode according to
prevailing conditions, automatically. Yes, this can do it.

The panorama assist is great. You can take a series of photos in a row in either of four directions (left to right, up and down, etc.) overlapping by one third (I really appreciate the rule of thirds grid which you can bring up on the LCD, keeping the camera straight and well composed), and then unite them with the included software into one long (or tall) file. I had reason to do this the other day at a long new school. Things do not build vertical out here in the desert, but there is plenty of room for horizontal, and a special Cinerama style long photo framing. In fact you could line up your whole town along the sidewalk standing and take one long photo of everyone in town. Just find printer and paper!

With the built in macro mode you can jump right into that cactus blossom from two inches away and have perfect focus. Take a photo of that baby's toes and blow them up to 16x20. Come in close to that ant stealing cracker crumbs on your picnic. This strength of macro was recently unimaginable, and yet here you have this power within a humble, tiny and inexpensive package.

What I really love and appreciate is the SDHC compliancy. I can use as standard memory card a regular Sandisk 4GB Secure Digital SD HC Memory Card (SDSDB-4096, BULK, No Reader) and have room for 500 shots at maximum resolution. You can truly, as we used to say a quarter century ago "shoot a roll; keep a shot." Take all of the shots you can, and then pick one out to use and delete the rest. For someone who used to burn through boxes of film (at 36 shots each max) and then do the darkroom processing all night, and then find a free way to get more, this is like living in another, finer dimension. Of course, you can put even larger SD HC memory cards in here and if you ever do fill one up and have nothing more to put in there and no time to delete, this camera comes with a generous 20MB internal memory on hand.

You can hook it up to the USB port of a computer directly and use the included software, or simply pop out the SD card and plug it into a reader and into the computer. Whatever works for you, although I do not like opening and closing the battery/card hatch too much. It is very strong and durable, but in the olden days I had a habit of snapping such things and putting them back together with duct tape. This one looks remarkably resilient nevertheless and has stood up to me.

Speaking of shooting a roll to get the one picture, have you ever taken a shot to discover your subject blinked? This camera lets you know. Yes, this camera sees when your subject blinks, and lets you know, using the Smart Portrait system. It also automatically fixes your red-eye special. You'll never see red eye again. It finds faces, and automatically focuses on them, up to a dozen at a time. It can also snap the shutter automatically when someone finally dares to smile. And the D-lighting will save those details otherwise lost in darkness.

As you can see, this camera does everything for you but serve as photo agency selling your work to Vogue or GQ. A great camera at a small price. What can go wrong?

The most amazing thing for me, of course, an old still shooter, is that this tiny camera is also a video camera, with built in mike, and a built in speaker for playback. You can make movies with this at two different resolutions, either for television playback at 640x480 or laptop at 320x240 (good for e-mailing). These home movies are truly sharp, with the same excellent back to front focus as the photos, and surprisingly high quality sound. The length of the movie is limited only to the size of your SDHC card; you could easily go for feature length! Using .AVI files, it can easily be edited as well.

Of course, this camera comes with the standard sized screw input for mounting on a tripod. I have used it on my Targus 66-inch heavy-duty tripod. Looks a little small up there, but it works great. You will really appreciate the steadiness a tripod always brings, and the freedom, no less with this great camera, which so thoughtfully has a tripod screw-in.

Hey, for the same price, this is way better than a cell phone!

Too bad this one is so, well, red!Get more detail about Nikon Coolpix L20 10MP Digital Camera with 3.6 Optical Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Deep Red).