Last week I decided to treat myself and buy a thrift store camera. Since the Digicam craze hit the market prices at thrift stores has skyrocketed for the thrift stores that still carry and stock Digicams (Goodwill for example now will never stock digital cameras in their physical stores and just moves any digicams they get in to Online Auction- which is sad but I have got a few decent deals this way).
Gone are the days of finding a $5 working digital camera at a Thrift Store. Now we are talking $20-50 instead; which put into perspective is about the same price as a Video game so its not the end of the world if it becomes something I don't like shooting, but thrift stores are no longer the "cheap" place for Digicams they once were.
I did end up finding a thrift store that actually had quite a few digicams in the front case and after making the employee pull them all out I felt bad for not buying one and making him put everything back for nothing even if they were a little pricey. But I was also able to test this one in the store to verify it worked which was a plus. I paid $40 USD for it which was admittedly more then I likely should have paid for this fairly basic lackluster bridge camera.
The Nikon Coolpix L105 comes out of a trend of similarly designed compact superzoom bridge cameras from the early 2010s. They were designed to be comfortable to hold and very easy to use; providing a much more ergo friendly alternative to a point and shoot or early smartphone without the price and complexity of a DSLR.
The Coolpix L105 was released in 2011 and sported a fairly average 12mp 1/2.3" CCD sensor and a 15X zoom. It ran on AA batteries which a lot of Digicam enthusiasts like instead of a dedicated rechargeable pack- but there is a downside to this which I will explain later.
It has no PASM dial and rather the scene modes were accessed through the main menu, encouraging the user just to use Intelligent Auto and forget about it. I shot mine in the standard P mode so I had the ability to adjust the exposure comp as it did have a hardware button for it.
As with other more "basic" budget bridge cameras it lacked the ability to shoot RAW or do full manual which is expected in most random thrift store digicams I find. It does have a 4 way control pad with the ok button in the middle which made it more appealing then some cameras I own as navigating menus and getting access to some of the core features like exposure comp and macro mode was easier.
Overall I enjoyed the output of the photos from this camera (which you will see later). It had a nice sharpness to it with vibrant CCD colors that made me have to do little to no editing in Post on them (with one exception which I will mention later). The 15x zoom was a comfortable range for shooting a variety of subjects.
However, this camera had a lot of flaws and I feel I likely overpaid for it as given my frustrations when shooting it I may not ever shoot again (likely will be on the chopping block for re-sale or a digicam trade in the future).
First off and most notably the battery door latch was VERY poorly designed, and mine may have been slightly damaged. When you put the AA batteries in the door has a lot of pressure on it, so much so that if it wasn't latched perfectly it would crack open just enough to lose contact with the batteries and shut down the camera. This was beyond frustrating as you had to open the door and close it before you could even retract the lens to fully shut the camera off when it happened.
Secondly was the battery life. In general the battery life on AA battery operated cameras is worse then those with dedicated packs, that much was certain. But even among other AA powered digicams this one stands out and not in a good way. First off it takes 4 AA batteries, not two and it burns through a fresh set of alkaline batteries in about 120 shots. Using high grade nicad rechargeables may extend your battery life a few extra shots but overall pretty lousy especially when considering it burns through 4 batteries each time.
The camera's LCD screen was Dim even with brightness adjusted which turned all the way up was nearly impossible to see on a bright day- this is a fairly common issue with digicams that lack a OVF or EVF however (more premium digicams like the Olympus XZ-1 have bright high contrast screens which can power through bright sunlight shooting.)
The Zoom was incredibly slow. Worse then pretty much every other digicam I own even older ones. Forget about using this camera for Wildlife photography (I tried) the bird will be long gone by the time the optical zoom extends to take the shot.
And lastly, the camera starts to fall apart at IS0 400 which is pretty a-typical for small sensor CCD digicams. However it uses very aggressive and primitive anti-noise algorithms so instead of getting somewhat organic CCD noise which can be artistic to use you wind up with a blurry smudge that looks like this:
In spite of my frustrations with the camera I did get some pleasant shots out of it and a few that actually surprised me. It's slow and clunky but it does have a pretty sharp lens; I just wish there was more you could do with it (like shooting RAW or manual modes) of course and that the zoom didn't take so long to extend. Also the Image Stabilization on mine was extremely noisy but that may have just been due to the condition of the camera and fact it likely had been sitting for years and may have had some internal dust in it.
Aside from the cropped and smeared photo of ducks that was taken at an ISO much higher then I needed (as I turned it off auto ISO for an indoor Macro shot and forgot to turn it back to Auto) here's a few of the shots that did turn out with this thrift store find:
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