Introduction

Ease of Use

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 follows on the All Weather tradition in terms of styling. It's a chunky unit, thanks to the tough exterior that protects against the elements. The lens has been positioned in the top corner, which seems to be a preferred spot for Nikon designers when designating the area to put the hole. The brightly coloured front (at least in the case of the red or blue versions) is a metal surface with glossy paint finish. That's all you see, though, because thick plastic takes over the rest of the camera to not only protect the camera, but also give an appearance of being tough.

On the right side of the camera is where you put the memory card and battery. It's easily identifiable thanks to the huge locking wheel in place to keep the area moisture free. To open it, you have to twist it with your thumb and forefinger while pressing the central button with your index finger. Or use two hands.

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 is certainly designed for the travelling photographer. There are a number of features that have been installed to help you along the way if you're doing just that. The AW110 has a built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) so you can keep track of where you take your pictures. Switching it on is done by pressing the button on the side of the camera. It only works if you input the correct time and date into the camera and it uses the time from the EXIF data to correlate with the time on the GPS. So when you take a picture at 4pm, the camera looks at where the GPS says it was at 4pm and links the information together. You can then upload the picture with that information onto Google Maps for friends and family to see. There's also a World Map display that will document your journey for you to see on the camera.

To help you upload the pictures sooner and share faster, the AW110 comes wifi enabled. This means that when you have a smart device (phone or tablet) nearby, you can pair it by using the Nikon app and transfer pictures via that.

Front	Back

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 has a resolution of 16 megapixels which sit on a back-illuminated sensor. These type of sensors have the circuitry placed on the back of the camera. It's normally on the front and slightly blocks each pixel making them less responsive to light. Back-illuminated sensors should have the opposite effect and be more responsive to light. Previous encounters with this technology haven't been positive for us, but we hold out hope for the AW110.

To increase the chances of getting a blur free photograph, the AW110 has a number of features in place to get that shot. What Nikon calls its Anti-blur technology is a mixture of features such as Hybrid VR (Vibration Reduction), High ISO (essentially ruins the image quality, but you get the shot) and the Best Shot Selector which takes a series of photographs and chooses the best out of the bunch to keep.

One other interesting feature on the Nikon Coolpix AW110 is the Altimeter. It's a small scale on the left side of the screen that tells you how high above sea level you are. It has a range of -300 – 4,500m and when you go underwater, it has a Hydro-barometer which can measure your depth up to 20m. Now this is a very important feature, because all current and previous underwater cameras don't tell you when you're reaching the tolerance levels of the waterproofing. This way, there's no chance of going too deep by accident. Couple that with the GPS and the robust build quality of the camera such as 18m waterproofing and 2m shock-proofing and it's a camera that extreme sports enthusiasts will be interested in.

Front	Waterproof Compartment

Press the green camera button and you open up the mode options. There are five shooting modes you can put the camera into. Which one you choose will be dependent on how much control you want to hand over to the camera. Let's make no mistake about it, there's no option for you to take full control. However, there is an option to lose all primary control except pointing, zooming and shooting. It's the first mode in the list which is denoted by a camera with a heart. It's called Easy Auto mode and when you hold the camera up to the scene you want to photograph, it analyses what's in the frame and selects the appropriate scene mode to get the best results. Keeping in the vein of handing over control, the next option is the Scenes mode, although you get to choose which one you want to use. There's a number of filters you can use such as Soft, Sepia, Mono, High-key, Low-key and Selective colour. If you're taking pictures of people, there's the Smart portrait option which works in the same way as the Easy Auto but also adds the beauty tool to improve skin flaws. Finally, there's the Auto mode at the bottom which gives you the most control out of them all.

In the Main menu, you have four sections listed down the left side for Shooting, Video, GPS and Set-up. The screen is split into three columns and the central column will be default highlighted. You can press left to scroll through the four sections or right to enter the sub-menu of the option you're highlighting.

There are a number of continuous shooting modes and what you're photographing will determine the mode you select. In Continuous H, we took six images at roughly one every 1/100sec. The camera stops after six pictures and takes a further 12 seconds to download from the buffer to the  memory card. The pictures are recorded at full resolution, though. In Continuous L we shot 19 pictures within a ten second time frame which averages out at 1.9fps (frames per second). The camera still records at full resolution, but takes over a minute to complete downloading to a class 6 memory card. Pre-shooting cache mode takes a burst of 25 pictures in two seconds, but they're recorded at 1 megapixel. There's also a high speed 120fps and 60fps shooting mode which record at 300,000 pixels. They're great for super fast action as long as you have no intention of printing them up or zooming in to see detail on a computer.

Memory Card Slot	Battery Compartment

Start up from cold is around 1.5sec. Or that's the fastest we could do it. We suspect that it's actually a bit faster, but the Nikon Coolpix AW110 won't focus while it's performing its start up tasks. There's no indication when it's done, so its trial and error. It would only be the difference of a few microseconds and even 1.5sec is faster than many digital compact cameras by around 1sec.

You can access the playback function of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 regardless of whether it's switched on or off. If it's off, you have to hold the button down for a few seconds so that it knows you've not caught it accidentally. Otherwise it's just a firm push. The images will come up full screen with the option of adding effects by pressing ok. The information on the screen will disappear after a few seconds, but you can still press ok to enter the Digital Effects screen. Press the Menu button and the Playback menu replaces the Shooting and Video menus. GPS and Set-up remain. In this section, you can retouch the images again, add D-Lighting which is a type of dynamic range boost. You can also protect pictures to avoid them getting deleted by mistake, rotate them, add audio among other things.

Upon opening the box, you'll find a thick booklet which is a Quick Start Guide. It looks substantial, but is in fact in several languages. The full manual is on the enclosed CD which also holds a basic editing and tagging program ViewNX 2. Beneath the camera and lithium ion battery, there's a charging unit, video cable, USB cable and long strap. There's also a filter holder for if you decide to purchase any additional filters and a brush for cleaning the unit of dirt once it's dry.

Image Quality

All images were taken at full resolution unless otherwise stated. The full resolution compression can be adjusted by going into the Main menu and selecting either the 16 megapixel option for normal quality or with the star for fine quality. A fine quality image producers an image around 5Mb in size, while the normal setting produces around 3.5Mb.

Noise

Nikon have been playing a dangerous game recently. The noise appearing on the digital cameras hasn't gone unnoticed by us or photographers. The AW110 seems to have a better grasp of noise control though. We examined the images at full magnification but at normal viewing distance, the pictures are ok up to around ISO 1600. You can see noise coming through at earlier stages, but it's certainly not upsetting to see.

At full magnification, ISO 125 images are gorgeous. Highly detailed, smooth and rich in colour. The use of ISO 125 over ISO 100 will afford you around a third extra stop of light which means a slight increase in shutter speeds in lower light without any noticeable increase in noise.

There's a slight increase in noise reduction output on the darker areas at ISO 400, but the pictures are still great quality. The biggest change appears at ISO 800 with a dappling of detail on the low key areas. Mid-tones still seem ok but there's a slight reduction in primary colours.

ISO 1600 sees a massive shift in the amount of noise showing through. There's a mass of salt and pepper noise scattering the whole image with blobs of colour in the darker areas. Sharp edges are beginning to blur and primary colours are starting to fade.

Finally at ISO 3200, colour has all but disappeared from the picture and colour noise swarms all areas.

ISO 125 (100% Crop)	ISO 200 (100% Crop)
ISO 400 (100% Crop)	ISO 800 (100% Crop)
ISO 1600 (100% Crop)	ISO 3200 (100% Crop)

Focal Range

The focal length of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 is 5x optical. That gives a 35mm equivalent of 28-140mm in 35mm terms.

28mm	140mm

Sharpening

At low ISO, the images look very sharp, but we did notice an increase in quality by just adding a standard sharpen in a photo editing suite.

Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)

File Quality

There are two JPEG quality settings available at full resolution, Normal and High. On the camera, the latter is denoted with an asterisk next to the megapixel count. The Nikon Coolpix AW110 doesn't shoot RAW. Here are some 100% crops which show the quality of the various options.

16M High (4.21Mb) (100% Crop)	16M Normal (3.34Mb) (100% Crop)

Chromatic Aberrations

We found slight amounts of chromatic aberration at the extreme edges of the frame. It occurs mostly with high contrast edges of white on black.

Chromatic Aberrations 1 (100% Crop)	Chromatic Aberrations 2 (100% Crop)

Macro

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 has a close focusing mode of 1cm. That's preety close and the only problem you may face is composing against low lying subjects (insects, for example) with the lens positioned so high. It's useful in underwater conditions though, to get some great shots of reefs. Probably. Just make sure the water is clear or the camera will focus on the dust in the foreground. Even with the AF assist switched off.

Macro	Macro (100% Crop)

Flash

Vignetting is a problem for the lens at wide-angle and using flash doesn't get rid of it either. It seems to dissipate through to the top end of the zoom range and the flash seems to simply stabilise what light is already there. That indicates an intelligent flash which will create a natural tone to skin and give the impression it's not fired.

Flash Off - Wide Angle (28mm)	Flash On - Wide Angle (28mm)
Flash Off - Telephoto (140mm)	Flash On - Telephoto (140mm)

Red-eye isn't a problem whether the mode is switched on or off. The pupil shrinks noticeably, so it does it's job right, but we didn't get red-eye anyway.

Flash On	Flash On (100% Crop)
Red-eye Reduction	Red-eye Reduction (100% Crop)

Night

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 has a Night scene mode as being able to use the Auto mode. Night mode gives you the option to use the camera hand-held or attached to a tripod. We used the Tripod option to ensure a decent comparison for the Auto mode which would also be tripod mounted.

Both modes used an f/3.9 aperture while the Night scene mode ramped up the ISO to 800 to allow a well exposed image. The Auto mode, we set to ISO 125 and it's underexposed despite a slightly longer shutter speed of 1sec. But the Night scene mode used a higher ISO to ensure a sharper image.

Longer exposures create a type of noise, though and noise reduction software is obviously at work here.

Night Auto	Night Auto (100% Crop)
Night Scene	Night Scene (100% Crop)

Sample Images

This is a selection of sample images from the Nikon Coolpix AW110 camera, which were all taken using the 16 megapixel Fine JPEG setting. The thumbnails below link to the full-sized versions, which have not been altered in any way.

Sample Movie & Video

Product Images

Front of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Side of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Side of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / Image Displayed

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / Nikon Coolpix AW110 Menu

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / Movie Menu

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / GPS Menu

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / Settings Menu

Rear of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 / Exposure Compensation Menu

Top of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Bottom of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Side of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Side of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Waterproof Compartment

Front of the Nikon Coolpix AW110

Memory Card Slot

Battery Compartment

Conclusion

The Nikon Coolpix AW110 is a part of an already saturated market of tough cameras designed to be taken anywhere. These days, you have to do something better to get the attention of the roving consumer eyes. So Nikon seem to have gone to town on the AW110 and added all sorts of little gizmos to make it irresistible to the extreme traveller. For example, in the past, these extreme cameras would simply have waterproofing and shock-proofing. Now, we have wifi, GPS, improved depth of waterproofing, higher drop tolerance and on the AW110 an Altimeter to measure how high above sea level you are.

Nikon have increased the durability of the AW110 making it go deeper and be dropped from higher. The design is still typical of most tough cameras with the thick plastic and while it will play it's part in keeping the precious internal workings safe, there's a few cameras out there that don't have it and we can't help think that it's a bit of show.

Image quality is a big improvement on previous Nikon offerings, but they're still not there yet. Noise performance is a big improvement. Colours are vibrant and the sharpness is great. Drill down into the photographs and noise is evident at mid-range settings which is a mild improvement on previous Nikon digital compact cameras.

So what we're seeing in the Nikon Coolpix AW110 is a welcome return to quality imaging from one of the best known and most trusted brands in the photographic industry. The AW110 certainly seems like a step in the right direction and used properly, the pictures that it produces look lovely.

If you're into your extreme sports and also enjoy cataloguing all your activities, then the Nikon Coolpix AW110 deals with everything from where you are to how high or low you are by adding a new dimension with the altimeter. With the aforementioned improvement in image quality and the added durability, this is a serious contender. You should take a look at the new Nikon Coolpix AW110.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	4.5
Ease-of-use	4
Image quality	4
Value for money	4

Main Rivals

Listed below are some of the rivals of the Nikon Coolpix AW110.

Review Roundup

Reviews of the Nikon Coolpix AW110 from around the web.

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