Digital Cameras: Nikon Coolpix A puts an APS-C sensor in your pocket

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The good: The Nikon Coolpix A produces the excellent photos you'd expect from a large sensor, and the camera is well built with a streamlined, if somewhat point-and-shoot-like, design. The bad: For the price, it needs to deliver a little more, such as a viewfinder; aspects of its performance could be better. The bottom line: If you're very picky about photo quality and prefer autofocus to manual -- but don't care about a viewfinder -- the Nikon Coolpix A is probably worth the money. Otherwise, wait for the price to drop. Nikon follows Leica and Fujifilm in delivering a fixed-focal-length lens model with an APS-C sensor, and as I suspected when I first saw it, this camera has a couple of weaknesses given its almost $1,100 price. While it delivers great photos and reasonable performance, the feature set and design leave it in a sort of competitive limbo. The trend toward larger sensor sizes is important, because all things being equal, larger sensors tend to deliver better quality, and manufacturers tend to surround them with higher quality parts. But the cameras are also necessarily larger and equipped with fixed-focal length, rather than zoom lenses (for better optics). At their higher prices, though, many people find that a camera with a medium-size sensor costing hundreds less is good enough. (Aside: The Coolpix A is terribly named. "A" is an ignored word in search engines, which means when you search on "Nikon Coolpix A" without quotation marks it returns results for all Coolpix cameras. So always use quotation marks when searching for it. It's the most SEO-unfriendly name since the Pentax *ist.) Image quality Images from the Coolpix A look great. JPEGs are very clean up through ISO 800; there's a noticeable sharpness difference between ISO 800 and ISO 1600. ISO 3200 is usable, especially if you shoot raw, but I wouldn't recommend going higher than that unless you're willing to make some compromises with respect to graininess. The lens is extremely sharp in center for f2.8 through f8 and reasonable up through f16, but unsurprisingly soft at f22. Edge sharpness isn't quite as good; it's OK at f8 but not great at any other aperture. Its seven-bladed aperture delivers nice bokeh at f2.8, but when you stop it down a little bit. it becomes unattractively polygonal.