Nikon COOLPIX L18 Digital is an amazing little camera!

Great things do come in small packages. The Nikon COOLPIX L18 Digital Camera is a full function digital compact that fits in your shirt pocket. The 8 MP images are super sharp and rival any SLR digital of that range.

The camera comes in three colors...black, blue and red. We bought the blue, which is a very deep color.

The lens retracts when not in use and is protected within the unit. There is no eye level viewfinder, and you simply use the 3 inch LCD screen all the time. Yes, it means a bit of power consumption, but the camera has an energy saving mode that will put the camera into low power automatically after a few minutes.

Lots of settings for those who like to use programming(night shots, sports, closeups, etc). However, most people will just use the default auto setting where you turn the camea on and click the shutter...the camera does everything else.

It even has a "face recognition" feature to keep the focus on faces vs. surrounding objects.This is truly cutting edge. The camera will recognize when a face in in the viewscreen and place a focus square around the face...which will follow the face as it moves about in the field of view...staying in focus! It only reacts to human faces..as we tried it with our pet cat and nothing registered in the camera as a "face".

Great for group shots as the camera will focus on the closest face in the default setting(you can change it to be more creative).

It records digital movies with sound.Play back on your TV with the supplied video/AV cords. It produces very nice images with pretty decent sound. A winner all the way around.

Nikon Quality results! Perfect for casual use and vacations. Uses SD memory cards and has a built-in 21MB internal memory capability(you'll want a lot more for this camera as 8MP eats up memory space very quickly). Get a 1GB card for about $20 and it will let you record about 340 high resolution images.

I'm a photographer and use Nikon SLR's all the time...and this Coolpix compact unit really hits the mark on quality.