Nikon L12 Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Good overall color, only slight oversaturation in strong reds, blues and greens

Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc. Here, however, the L12 produced good results.

The other important part of color rendition is hue accuracy. Hue is "what color" the color is. The L12 did push some reds a little toward orange, and oranges toward yellow, but overall color looked good and realistic. All in all, better than average color handling, surprising in a camera this inexpensive.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Very good color balance with the Manual white balance option better than average with Auto, about average positive exposure compensation required.

Color balance indoors under incandescent lighting was a little warm and pinkish in Auto white balance mode (better than most cameras manage though), and the Incandescent setting resulted in stronger yellow color balance. However, the Manual option produced nearly accurate results, if just slightly greenish. The Nikon Coolpix L12 required a +1.0 EV exposure compensation adjustment for a bright exposure, which is about average for this shot. Overall color looks pretty good, though the blue flowers came out purple. (Many digital cameras push the blue flowers toward a darker, more purple hue.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the US.

Outdoors, daylight
Good color balance, very bright colors. Better than average exposure accuracy.

The Nikon L12's Outdoor shots generally showed accurate exposure with pretty good highlights. Shadow detail was limited, with some visible noise suppression artifacts. Exposure accuracy overall was quite a bit better than average, the camera requiring less exposure compensation than we're accustomed to seeing with consumer digicams.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
High resolution, 1,300 ~ 1,400 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns from the Nikon Coolpix L12 down to about 1,400 lines per picture width horizontally, and about 1,300 lines per picture height vertically, with extinction at around 1,600 - 1,700. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail. Beware that while you might be able to make out what looks like distinct lines at numbers higher than those we've mentioned here, the camera is just doing its best to continue interpreting the lines.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Fairly sharp images, though some blurring of detail from noise suppression.

The Nikon Coolpix L12's images are fairly sharp at wide angle and slightly soft at telephoto. I noticed only subtle over-sharpening and edge enhancement on the camera's part in high contrast scenes like the one above. (Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.)

Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears. The crop at far right shows this, which shows lower detail than most, because the L12 chose ISO 400 for this shot.

ISO & Noise Performance
The Coolpix L12's automatically controlled ISO setting produced moderately high noise.

The Nikon Coolpix L12 automatically adjusts the ISO sensitivity, anywhere from 50 to 1000, so we couldn't produce our usual table of results at different ISO settings. The shot above was taken at around ISO 400, and shows moderately high image noise, with somewhat soft fine detail. The resulting images were rather soft and a little noisy looking at 8x10 inches, but good at 5x7, excellent at 4x6.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with pretty good overall detail, though limited shadow detail. Limited low-light capabilities.

Sunlight:
Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

The Nikon Coolpix L12 had a little trouble with the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above, producing high contrast and a dim overall exposure, but it underexposed less than most cameras we test. Detail is limited in the shadow areas, partly from some noise suppression. There's a bit of a trade-off between the two images that are closest to the correct exposure. Though some areas are still a little dark at +0.3 EV, I preferred it to the image at +0.7 EV, which had far too many blown highlights. In "real life" though, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.)

Low light:
Here again, the Nikon L12's auto ISO adjustment prevented us from making our usual table showing performance as a function of ISO setting, but the results do show how it behaved at light levels typical of outdoor, after-dark photography. On the whole, the Nikon Coolpix L12's exposure system was somewhat limited in low lighting. Both ISO and shutter speed are fully automatic on this model, and since the longest shutter speed is one second, the camera boosted ISO instead, resulting in rather noisy images. Although the camera captured bright results down to the 1/4 foot-candle light level, it had to use ISO 910 to achieve it, and the noise levels were pretty high. Still though, at the one foot-candle level (about equivalent to city street lighting at night), the image quality is good enough for very good 4x6 inch prints, and acceptable 5x7 inch ones. The camera's autofocus system worked well down to just below the 1/2 foot-candle light level unassisted. Do keep in mind though, that the longer shutter times associated with the Night modes demand the use of a tripod or other camera support to get sharp photos. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) For such applications, you may have better luck with a digital SLR camera, but even there, you'll likely need to set the focus manually. For information and reviews on digital SLRs, refer to our SLR review index page.

Coverage and Range
A slightly weak flash, our standard shots required less than average positive exposure compensation.

Flash coverage was uneven at wide angle, though much more uniform at telephoto. In the Indoor test, the Nikon Coolpix L12's flash underexposed our subject at its default setting, requiring a less than average +0.7 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get reasonably bright results. The camera's Slow-Sync flash mode also produced good results with +0.7 EV exposure compensation, though the background incandescent lighting results in a strong orange-yellow cast.

There is no way to force the L12's ISO sensitivity to 100 for our standard flash range test, but as you can see, results are quite bright at 8 feet using ISO 95 at wide angle. Image brightness remains fairly constant as the camera boosts ISO to compensate for the added distance. At telephoto, the ISO 97 image taken at 7 feet is a bit dim, but again brightness does not fall off.

Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims. In the shots above, the L12 seems to perform exactly as Nikon says it will, producing good exposures at the rated distances with its ISO set to Auto, however it had to boost sensitivity quite a bit to IS0 514 to remain bright at full telephoto. (The underexposure at wide angle and 26 feet is undoubtedly because the white wall and doors to the studio reflected too much light back at the camera. - We need to paint those walls a darker color, to help cameras with flash ranges beyond about 20 feet!)

Print Quality
Good print quality, good color, very usable 11x14 inch prints.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro 9000, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 review for details on that model.)

With the Nikon Coolpix L12, we found that it had enough resolution to make very crisp 8x10 inch prints. At 13x19 inches, its prints were softer, but probably adequate for wall or table display, though the softness in the corners of the frame does indeed show up at this size. High-ISO performance under dim lighting will be something of a turkey-shoot, as the fully automatic exposure system leaves you never knowing just what ISO setting the camera is going to choose. That said though, even its highest-ISO shots will make 4x6 inch prints that will be acceptable to many (if not most) users. The lighting for our "indoor portrait" test is somewhat brighter than you'll find in most residential interiors in the US, and at that level produced ISO 400 shots that looked quite good at 5x7 inches, but rough at 8x10. So give it as much light as you can, but expect 8x10 inch prints from indoor shots to be soft and noisy. If you can get by with 4x6 inch snapshot prints though, you'll probably be happy with shots captured by the L12 under almost any condition.

Color-wise, the Nikon Coolpix L12's images looked great when printed on the Pro 9000, with bright, vibrant color that stopped short of being too bright. To our eyes, the Nikon L12 strikes just the right balance between color saturation and believability in its images. Very well done.