Nikon Coolpix L3 Review

By CSharpner · November 4, 2009

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I bought this camera when I was out in Colorado Springs for some training courses.  Colorado Springs sits right under the shadow of Pike’s Peak, one of the tallest mountains in the world, which peaks at just over 14,000 feet!  Of course, I was dying to drive up to the top while I was out there, and I did.  Obviously, I needed to take pictures, so I bought the Nikon Coolpix L3 while I was out there.

I have to say, I was not disappointed with this camera.  The color was fantastic!  It has a photo mode to support wide, panoramic imaging by assisting you in taking multiple, overlapping images.  Later, you can use the software that comes bundled with the camera on CD to merge them together to form a single, continuous, wide panoramic image.  Or, you can use your favorite photo editing software that can stitch overlapping images together.  Pike’s Peak is one of the best places in the world for this feature.  Near the bottom of this article, I’ll post some of my pictures of Pike’s Peak I took with this camera as well as some panoramic shots of some rockets down at NASA’s rocket garden in Florida.

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The Specs:

It’s a 5.1 megapixel camera, with a 3 power optical zoom, built in flash, and is small and compact in size.  It seems to last a good while on two double AA batteries.  Even on rechargeables, it takes many pictures.  Is has an SD memory slot.  I bought a 2GB card when I bought the camera, but I believe it will support up to a 4GB card.  2GB is plenty of room for hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures at the highest quality, plus plenty of room of lots of video as well.

It has a decently sized LCD screen and a digital menu system for different settings like dusk or dawn, daylight, indoors, snow, museum mode (for no flash), time exposure, and it also records videos with pretty good quality.  Here’s a video of Knoxville’s Boomsday Fireworks show this year that I took with the L3:

Be sure to watch it in full screen mode.  Remember, YouTube compresses the video and loses some of the quality, but it’s fairly close to the original.  Also remember, this video was taken from a still shot camera!  I use this camera, not just as a still shot camera, but also as a backup camcorder.  The Boomsday event was one such event where I ran out of power on my HD camcorder and recorded the rest of the event with this camera on just two double AA batteries.  I did not run out of memory or power.

If you use the camera without a flash, be sure you’ve got plenty of light (preferably, in direct sunlight), or use a tripod to stabilize the image, otherwise, it’ll be tough to get a sharp image since it’ll keep the shutter open for a good while to collect enough light.

Here are some actual images I’ve taken with this camera.  Click each one for a larger size image:

Pike's Peak 4x3  DSCN0002_1 DSCN0002_2 101_3286 DSCN0002 DSCN0034  DSCN0038 DSCN0039 DSCN0040 DSCN0041 DSCN0042 DSCN0071 DSCN0074 DSCN0246 DSCN1583 DSCN0233 DSCN0268 DSCN0288 DSCN1403 DSCN1473

Here are some vertical panorama’s I made of the rockets at NASA’s rocket garden in Florida when I took the family down there to see the Space Shuttle Endeavor launch.  Each rocket was photographed with a series of 3 or more photos.  I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to stitch them together into a panorama:

DSCN0003 Stitch DSCN0003 Stitch DSCN0003 Stitch DSCN0003 Stitch DSCN0003 Stitch

The panorama assist is pretty nice.  First, you turn on the feature, then each image you take is then partially overlapped and transparent overlaid on the live view screen, so you can easily line up the next photo.  Also, the white balance, focus, and all other automatic settings are locked in so all photos in the series match.

Pros:

Cons:

The only complaint I have about this camera is it’s confusing to find where the settings you want are in the menu system.  Other than that, the quality is outstanding and it has more features than you’ll ever use.  I give this a 4 out of 5 stars!

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