Home > Consumer Reviews > Nikon L12 Digital Camera - Silver (7MP, 3x Optical Zoom) 2.5 inch LCD

Being a big Nikon fan, I went for this little camera to supplement my Nikon D50 DSLR. What a disappointment. At best it is an average point-and-shoot, at worse it is almost unusable in some circumstances. The camera is slow, slow, slow! It takes a long time to focus, a long time to display the photograph you have just taken (meaning taking several photographs in a row is near impossible) and in particular it takes a long time to recharge the flash. Speaking of which, the camera seems intent on not using the flash unless it absolutely has to - often resulting in grey, grainy photographs. This means I often have to override the camera defaults, which rubs against the idea of a point-and-shoot! Shots with the flash are, in fairness, pretty good and in general the photographs are not bad. If does get very confused if there is a bright light source in the frame (including the sky!) and regularly underexposes. Okay, coming from using a DSLR I could accept that maybe I had a high baseline comparison, and that point-and-shoots have these sort of limitations; Normally I would accept that, but for the fact that my wife's similarly priced Sony is so much better it puts Nikon to shame. Now wishing that I had not thought the idea of having the same camera as my wife was silly, and bought the Sony (DSC-W50) instead.

Opinion: A disappointment. After 2 month stopped focusing at all.
Pros: Quite good on paper. wide angle shooting mode(crop), 640*400 video with voice
Cons: Extremely slow flash recharge, battery life extremely short, USB2.0 is the SLOW one, extremely bad on focusing

I bought a Nikon L12 and it lasted one week - just died! I sent the camera back to Nikon. They refuse to replace my camera or fix it. Don't buy any Nikon products. I bought it because of its AA battery capabilities because its hard to find electricity in many outback places - but after one week all the batteries I tried did not work. Buy a Canon Product instead - I own two digital PowerShots and they work great (just buy an extra rechargable battery).

I have to repeat what the other comments have said about this camera. Despite producing some nice results and being user friendly, the camera has seized up after one year of use, just after the guarantee expired I note. Prior to this, battery life gradually slowed down after each use and eventually it would not switch on at all. I will not be buying nikon products again.

The Nikon L12 was the camera I brought to replace a 4 year old 2 mega pixel Fuji film camera I used to have. Oh dear. On paper this Camera talks the talk however when I started using it I was a little disappointed with the results. The camera is fairly slow all round. In Anything but very good light conditions I found the pictures to be very grainy and not very well defined.
Pros are that the camera feels very well built and so far I have had no mechanical problems (reading the other reviews though makes me feel like I may have been lucky). The camera also looks nice and is quite straight forward to use. I wouldn't buy another Nikon now. I'll stick to Fuji film cameras which I've always found to be excellent.