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Last week I reviewed the Fujifilm FinePix A700, a camera so basic I had a hard time finding enough to write about it. This week I have another one that’s even easier, if anything. I’d better try another DSLR soon or I’ll forget how to use a real camera.

The Nikon CoolPix L5 was launched in the UK in September last year alongside the slightly more sophisticated L6 as the top end of the lifestyle-oriented L-series of Nikon’s CoolPix L-series of simple pocket compacts. It has an exterior design that bears a superficial resemblance to the budget 4-megapixel CoolPix L4, but the resemblance is no more than superficial. The L5 offers the benefits of a 7.2-megapixel sensor, a 5x optical zoom lens, Nikon optical VR image stabilization and the current must-have gimmick, face recognition technology. It’s also a lot more expensive than the L4, currently available for around £152. Compared to other similarly-specified point-and-shoot big-zoom compact cameras like the Kodak EasyShare C875 (£140), Olympus FE-240 (£170), Ricoh Caplio R5 (£200) and Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07 (£220 £), the L5 is quite cheap.

Although the CoolPix L5 has a few technological tricks up its sleeve, it’s a very easy-to-use camera designed for those who don’t want any frills, where all they have to do to take a picture is aim at it and push a button. Measuring 97 x 61 x 45mm and weighing around 220g including standard alkaline batteries, it’s quite large and surprisingly heavy for a compact camera, especially given the rather chunky 6.3 – 31.4mm (38 – 190mm Equiv.) lens and the fact that it is powered by two AA cells. The lens doesn’t retract all the way into the camera body, giving the camera an awkward shape to fit comfortably in your pocket. The extra size means it’s a fairly easy-to-hold camera, with well-spaced controls and plenty of gripping space front and back, but the slippery glossy finish and lack of a real hand grip mean you’ll have to keep a firm grip.

While the case itself is mostly plastic, it’s strong and well constructed, and that glossy finish helps resist smudges and scratches. The controls are solidly mounted and the battery door has a locking latch so it won’t open in your pocket. That’s a good thing, too, since the batteries don’t have an independent latch and can easily fall out when you open them to change the memory card.

The LCD monitor is clear and bright, with an effective anti-glare coating, so it can be used in bright sunlight if you can find any. However, it’s not particularly sharp at just 115,000 pixels and has a fairly low refresh rate, so it can appear slow and jerky as you move the camera to follow the action.

The overall performance is not impressive. The camera takes a slow four seconds to boot up to the point where it’s ready to shoot and over 3 seconds to shut down again as the lens retracts quite slowly. The AF system is about average, taking around a second to lock on in most lighting conditions, although the lack of an AF illuminator limits its usefulness in low light.

In burst mode, it can take about one picture every second and a half, which isn’t too bad for a budget camera, and it can maintain that rate until the memory card is full. At maximum resolution and image quality, the L5 produces JPEG files averaging around 2.2MB, which is very small for a 7MP camera, but means a 1GB SD card will do around 282 images, or 11 minutes 36 seconds of video material is sufficient for the highest quality setting.

The built-in flash is nice and powerful, with a maximum range of 5.5m wide-angle and excellent frame coverage, but it takes a long time to charge between shots, often over eight seconds.

As I mentioned before, the L5 is very short on features. It doesn’t have a manual ISO setting, just an automatic adjustment with a maximum of ISO 400. Unfortunately, the maximum setting is very noisy, and as there’s no way to stop the camera from selecting it, it means some low-light photos are very poor quality.

Of course, there are no manual exposure settings, but the L5 has 15 scene program settings including all the standards such as portrait, landscape, sports, night scene, beach/snow, dusk/dawn, sunset and more. There are no surprises, but there are enough choices to handle most shooting situations.

Color customization is also limited to the basic defaults, with a vibrant high-saturation mode, sepia, monochrome, and the blue-toned cyanotype option. White balance and flash modes also cover all the usual bases as detailed in the feature table on page 4. There is a manual preset option for white balance.

The only two special features are the VR image stabilization (Vibration Reduction) and the face recognition system. I have to say I wasn’t particularly impressed with the VR. Most optical or CCD Shift IS systems offer about 2 stops of extra stability when shooting at low shutter speeds, but I found the VR system to be very inconsistent and shots that were just a stop below the recommended minimum speed in hand were held, were often blurred. It doesn’t appear to be as effective as similar systems used by Canon or Panasonic.

Face ID, as I mentioned earlier, is more of a gimmick than a really useful feature. While the Nikon system is as good as any, it only recognizes faces looking directly at the camera, and even then, things like large sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, and strong sidelights can confuse it. It’s really only useful for basic portraiture, and even then it doesn’t make much difference to standard AF and metering systems. It’s certainly very clever technology, but certainly not worth paying extra for.

Finally, moving to image quality, and this is where the L5 falls badly. As I mentioned earlier, even the maximum quality setting produces very small and heavily compressed image files, severely limiting image quality. In addition, the lens is not one of Nikon’s best, as it produces very noticeable barrel distortion at wide angle with very poor edge and corner sharpness. While color rendition and exposure were generally accurate, the level of fine detail was much lower than most 6MP compact cameras I’ve tested. One has to wonder what exactly is the point of putting a powerful 7.2 megapixel sensor in a camera crippled by poor noise reduction, high compression and an inferior lens.

“‘Verdict”‘

The Nikon CoolPix L5 is something of a mixed bag. It offers a decent zoom range and resolution, ease of use and ease of use, but its slow performance, clunky appearance, and poor image quality are major drawbacks. There are better cameras for not much more money.

“There are no ISO test shots for this test because the CoolPix L5 doesn’t have manual ISO control. Some of these images can be downloaded in full size. Click on the images as directed.”

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With a wide-angle end equivalent to 38mm, the L5 isn’t great for panoramic landscapes, but it does have panoramic stitching capability.

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The telephoto end of the 5x optical zoom range is 190mm, which is pretty handy for capturing distant detail but falls short of superzoom standards.

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Color reproduction and exposure are good in normal lighting conditions.

“Here, the full-size image has been scaled down for bandwidth reasons, and a crop of the original full-resolution image has been placed underneath so you can appreciate the overall quality.”

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Here is a shot of the front of Exeter Cathedral, my favorite shot for detail comparison. Below is a full-resolution crop of the center of this image.

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Compare the level of detail in this shot to similar images I’ve taken with other cameras to see how the L5 performs. For this shot, the camera’s light meter selected 79 ISO. I’ve seen better detail from six-megapixel compact cameras, largely due to the L5’s high compression JPEG files.

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Although it’s only equivalent to 38mm, the wide-angle end of the zoom range creates significant barrel distortion.

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This image is cropped from the top right corner of the previous shot. As you can see, the corner sharpness is very poor.

characteristics

We might not like the way Motorola is naming its phones here at TrustedReviews, or the way it’s been caught up in some kind of design rut lately with its wannabe, flat-keyboard, size-zero look seems.

But the company doesn’t seem to be showing much sign of either of those conventions being retired just yet, and here we are on the cards with two new RAZR phones. One of them is the MOTORAZR Maxx, the other is the current test cell phone, the MOTORAZR V3xx.

We’ve never reviewed a RAZR incarnation before – unless you count Riyad’s glimpse of one in passing as he reviewed BT Fusion, so hold on to your hat while I take the plunge.

Like many Motorola phones, the MOTORAZR V3xx isn’t at the top of the tech specs – except for one thing. It supports HSDPA with speeds up to 3.6 Mbit/s. It’s the first handset in 3 to support HSDPA at this speed and if you buy it you’ll be well ahead of the curve. However, you might as well spend your money on a chocolate teapot. After checking with the marketing folks at Three, I was told that this HSDPA speed is “hopefully” coming out in the first half of this year, but there are no firm commitments there. Of course, using the old 3G standard, the phone will keep roaring when there is a signal.

In terms of design, the MOTORAZR V3xx will not surprise anyone familiar with the RAZR concept. This is a flip phone that’s slightly taller (102.9mm) and wider (53mm) in closed mode than seems reasonable. It just feels a bit big to hold comfortably. It’s not exactly thin at 14.9mm and at 107g it surpasses the magical 100g barrier.

For an extremely thin alternative, take a look at Samsung’s SGH-D830 (just don’t try to open it with one hand – ed.).

Like many other Motorola phones, the Flip doesn’t extend the full height of the bezel – there’s a 15mm plus full handset-thick lip along the bottom front edge. The front bezel and rear case are mostly black with some flashes of silver around the edges and where the clapper meets the lip.

In the front case sits a small CSTN screen with 65,000 colors, 19 mm wide and 16 mm high, displaying 96 x 80 pixels. It looks a little lost in the vastness of the outer shell, and both it and its large frame picked up more fingerprints than a US immigration officer. The rest of the front outer case is mostly glossy and has managed without trying to look dirty.

Open and we move from black with a silver border to silver with a black border. This is where the two plus points of the large clamshells come to the fore: both the main screen and the number pad are relatively large.

The main screen is a TFT and manages 262,000 colors in 320 x 240 pixels and fits in an area I measured at 55mm corner to corner, 34mm wide and 45mm high. It’s clear, sharp and bright – impressive and with the best screens I’ve seen on a handset.

I have to admit that I never really like the flat RAZR number pad, no matter how many times I see and use it. I like the tactile feel of real buttons. Still, I have to say in its favor that significant advances have been made since Motorola’s earliest flat number pads.

The buttons, in particular, are all large, they’re separated by slightly raised lines, and the numbers and other elements glow blue in dim conditions (of course it has to be blue), making them relatively easy to use.

As an HSDPA handset, the MOTORAZR V3xx is capable of video calling and for this purpose a small VGA camera is embedded in the hinge area between the screen and the keyboard. While the super-fast HSDPA is something of a tie, as I’ve mentioned, the MOTORAZR V3xx is a shade behind the times in every other respect.

The main camera has a resolution of up to 1.3 megapixels, which is far below today’s megapixel average. Its lens sits on the front flap so it faces outward when you open the phone, while when you close the phone it faces you. You can use the front screen to snap shots of yourself, but without a side button to activate the camera, you’ll have to launch it with the flip open. At the very least, this is a one-step process, as the camera software responds to a soft menu button.

The lens didn’t like being too close to its subject, and even slight movement of the handset during recording resulted in blurry images. Photographing everything that moved was a real challenge. It took many, many tries to get the test shot of the cat, and even then his face is a little blurry – people with shaky hands should take note.

There is a music player on board that can handle the file formats MP3, AAC and WMA. It produced reasonable sound quality from the device speaker and really impressive music quality through a headset. There’s 50MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot under the battery to add more song storage.

As far as sound quality goes, I could easily listen to music with this phone, but as a portable music player, there are two issues: the MOTORAZR V3xx has a mini-USB headphone jack, meaning it’s difficult to use your own wired headphones, and the battery life is appalling. I played just over four hours of continuous music from a microSD card. Four hours 11 minutes to be exact. That’s pretty bad, and it might prove difficult to get through a daily commute and lunch break on a single charge.

Other applications include a web browser (the excellent Opera browser), calendar, calculator, alarm clock, voice recorder, email, MMS, SMS and IM support.

“‘Verdict”‘

The MOTORAZR V3xx feels a bit like “more of the same” and its only saving grace from that moniker is 3.6Mbps HSDPA support. However, I’m not sure if that will be enough to earn a place in the collection of the best handsets. The camera and battery life in particular are serious disappointments.

How we test phones

We put every cell phone we test through its paces. We use industry standard tests to properly compare features and we use the phone as our main device during the review period. We will always tell you what we find and we never accept money to rate a product.

Learn more about how we test in our Ethics Policy.

Used as our main phone during the period

Verified against respected industry benchmarks and real-world tests

Always has a SIM card installed

Tested with phone calls, games and popular apps

points in detail

• Ease of use 7

• value 7

• functions 7

We’ve been looking at a whole range of laptops over the past few weeks, ranging from the extremely rugged Panasonic ToughBook CF-Y5 to the more fashion-forward Sony VAIO VGN-C2SL and Samsung Q35, and today I’m looking at another twist on the portable computing theme, the Pegasus 335 by Rock.

Dubbed the “entertainment center you can take with you on the go,” the Pegasus 335 is as close to a mid-range notebook as you can get. It’s not an ultra-fast slot machine, it’s not a dainty fashion accessory, and it’s not a cheap underpowered hunk of chips. Starting at £799 – our trial is around £1,100 – it’s a powerful work laptop with a good dose of multimedia capabilities.

The last Rock notebook we tested was actually the previous version of this Pegasus, the 330. Spode consistently gave it an eight out of ten, but that was back in June of last year and of course the technology has evolved a bit since then. So will the new version still fly high or did the Pegasus have its wings cut off?

In terms of looks, the 335 bears more than a passing resemblance to the 330. It retains the black and silver theme and the exact same dimensions of 316mm x 224mm x 31.9-34.4mm, the weight also remains at 2.1 kg. In fact, physically it’s pretty much identical. I really like the clean and simple look and the rounded edges make it very comfortable to use.

The screen size and resolution remain the same at 13.3 inches and 1280 x 768 respectively. It has a high-gloss contrast finish called X-Glass that really makes the glassy windows of Vista’s Aero finish stand out. Unfortunately, Aero’s rendering is about as much as the Intel 945GM graphics can handle, so you won’t be playing games with it.

However, the inclusion of a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 ensures the 335 flies through any 2D work you throw at it. In fact, the Pegasus 335 has a feature that overclocks the CPU by five percent when it’s plugged in, giving you a nice boost when you’ve got some intense tasks to do. Our review unit shipped with 2GB of DDR2 memory, and based on our experience with Vista, it’s wise to go for that amount as well. The included hard drive is 100 GB and rotates at 7,200 rpm. You can also get slower 5400 RPM 120GB and 160GB drives. For maximum performance, however, I would stick with the 100GB hard drive. Then, if you really need more storage space, you can always use an external hard drive.

In terms of connectivity, the Pegasus 335 isn’t exactly packed to the brim, but you’ll find all the essentials are there. A modem socket, two USB 2.0 ports, a DVD burner and an SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro card slot are on the left. Along the front is a switch for turning the wireless network on and off, as well as headphone and microphone jacks.

On the right side you will find a PC card slot, a third USB 2.0 port, a mini FireWire port, an S-Video out and an Ethernet port. Finally, the DC input and the VGA connector are located on the back. That’s a pretty standard list of ports, but the lack of a DVI-out and an ExpressCard slot may limit your options going forward.

The keyboard is a delight with its responsive, well-weighted keys. Most of the buttons are where you expect them to be, with just a few exceptions. I’d prefer to see the left ctrl key just below the left shift key, as I regularly use keyboard shortcuts (e.g. copy and paste) and found that I kept hitting the Fn key instead. I’d also like to see the backslash key in its usual position – the left shift key could easily be shortened to accommodate it. As for the touchpad, it’s very sensitive and accurate, and my only complaint is that since it’s not recessed, it was easy to accidentally swipe your thumb over it and let the cursor fly across the screen.

The integrated speakers aren’t great, with little overall volume and obviously very little bass, but you can’t expect much from a notebook of this size. Of even greater concern is that the headphone jack has a constant background hiss that can be quite annoying if you’re using some sensitive headphones.

There are two buttons next to the power button, both of which have unfamiliar markings. These are indeed two unique features of the Pegasus 300 range. The first is the InterVideo InstantOn button. When the computer is off, you can press this key to boot into a Linux-based media center. It has DVD, CD, MP3 and video players and a TV – a USB tuner is supplied with the notebook. The idea is that you need to avoid fully booting into Windows to take advantage of all these features. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it turns on instantly, as it takes about 15 seconds to start up. The software looks pretty snazzy but isn’t particularly intuitive to use and seemed to have trouble locating media on my computer. Also, since Vista has a built-in media center, you really have to worry about the extra 10-20 seconds it takes for Windows to boot to even bother using that. However, there are no Vista drivers for the included TV tuner yet, but Rock has assured me that the driver is on the way.

The second button is the Silence button, which lowers the clock speed of the CPU so that the fan does not have to be turned on. The system is pretty quiet anyway, but this feature is certainly welcome for avoiding the fan kicking in while you’re watching a movie or listening to music, and of course you’ll extend battery life while this is on. Combined with automatic overclocking, this notebook gives you decent control over the balance between performance and battery life.

I tested the 335 using PCMark 05 and our in-house 2D benchmarks. Sysmark and MobileMark are still not compatible with Vista, so we can’t use them yet. Therefore, to test the battery life, I simply used the laptop until the battery died, and I managed to work with it for about three and a half hours. For comparison, I used the results of our test reports on the Sony VAIO VGN-C2SL and Samsung Q35. They are all based on similar platforms and roughly the same price.

As you’d expect, the faster processor and larger amount of RAM means the Rock outperforms the rest across the board. The differences are generally between 10 and 40 percent, with the exception of the PCMark graphics score, which reflects the fact that all computers use the same weak graphics processor.

Overall I found the Pegasus 335 to be a joy to use – touchpad and shortcut slips aside – and for general everyday use I couldn’t fault it. However, I can’t help feeling that this notebook is just a little behind the competition. Using LEDs to backlight the screen would increase battery life and reduce weight. I’d also like to see a webcam built into the display bezel, and there’s no Bluetooth. After all, without an ExpressCard slot, you’re limiting yourself for future expansion.

“‘Verdict”‘

If you’re looking for a decent notebook that’s portable yet powerful, then the Rock Pegasus 335 is for you. However, like the Sony Vaio VGN-C2SL, the Samsung Q35 offers more features, weighs less and costs less, and would still get my vote in the end.

How we test laptops

Unlike other websites, we thoroughly test every laptop we review over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to properly compare features. We will always tell you what we find. We never accept money to rate a product.

Learn more about how we test in our Ethics Policy.

Used as our main laptop during the period

Tested for at least a week

Consistent benchmarks used for fair comparisons to other laptops

Verified against recognized industry benchmarks and real-world usage

points in detail

• performance 9

• value 7

• functions 7