The shutter button, which responds to the usual half-press to activate auto-focus and full press to take a picture, is ringed by the on/off dial on the Coolpix's top. The back panel holds the plain optical viewfinder (with no diopter for glasses wearers or focusing lines to help frame a shot); a typically small (1.5-inch diagonal) but reasonably bright and sharp (110,000-pixel) color LCD monitor; buttons to cycle through flash, focus, and self-timer modes; and a familiar compass dial of four buttons for paging through images and controlling wide-angle or telephoto zoom. The controls are well placed for one-handed use, though the camera's so small it takes a bit of precise practice to work the zoom buttons with your thumb.

A nifty quick-view button lets you review the shot just taken or others on the LCD without formally switching the camera from shooting to playback mode (seeing either quarter-screen thumbnails, with the rest of the LCD still serving as a viewfinder, or full-screen images, then half-tapping the shutter to return to shooting). Actual playback mode offers one-, four-, or nine-image viewing and zooming, although the zoom or close-up view disappointingly jumps between adjacent sections of an image rather than letting you pan or scroll smoothly through it.

The Coolpix 775 has a 3X Zoom Nikkor lens (F/2.8 to F/4.9, 5.8mm to 17.4mm, equivalent to 38mm to 115mm on a 35mm film camera); a 2.5X digital zoom serves shooters who want to zero in on the middle of an image even at the expense of final quality. Normal focus ranges from 11.8 inches to infinity; macro mode (which cuts off half of the zoom functionality) goes from 1.6 inches to infinity.

A self-timer gives you 3 or 10 seconds to get into the picture, while the flash button cycles through auto, forced-on, forced-off, red-eye reduction, and slow-sync modes. Nikon rates the built-in flash's range at 1.3 to 9.8 feet (with macro as close as 8 inches). A burst or continuous-shooting mode snaps a maximum of five images at about 1.5 frames per second, while a multi-shot mode takes a sequence of 16 frames (400 by 300 pixels each) and tiles them on a single 1,600 by 1,200 image.

Take It Your Way

Beginners will be content to rely on the 775's fully automatic, point-and-shoot mode, while more serious photographers will use the same mode but take advantage of the LCD menu options to adjust exposure compensation (-2 to +2 EV, in 0.3 EV increments); image sharpening (auto, normal, high, low, off); and white balance (auto, incandescent, fluorescent, cloudy, sunny, flash, or manual -- the last a bit unusual in a consumer-oriented camera with no provision for manual shutter or aperture priority or exposure bracketing).

The auto mode also offers one of our favorite features, best shot selection (BSS). This option -- for which flash is unavailable -- takes up to 10 images, shooting as long as you hold down the shutter button, and then throws out all but the sharpest one before saving it to the memory card. There's no disgrace in leaning on BSS when light is dim or you're trying to take a close-up without flash; your hands are shakier than a tripod.

Spin the dial on top of the camera, however, and you can find a happy middle ground between generic auto-focus/auto-exposure and more finicky adjustments: seven "scene modes," which use preset exposure and sometimes flash settings for optimized results with indoor or party photos; backlit subjects (fill flash); close-up portraits; night portraits or other dark close-ups (slow shutter, red-eye flash); landscapes or city skylines (maximum depth of field); bright beach or snow scenes; or sunsets (long exposure to capture colors in low light).

A tripod is suggested for some of the slow-shutter-speed choices, but we were impressed with how in most cases the scene modes improved on generic default shots. (It was also fun to occasionally try different modes for the same shot, as a variation on the monochrome/sepia/arty options available with some cameras.)

And we enjoyed the Coolpix's image quality overall, with under-1-foot macro close-ups and broader outdoor shots proving our favorites. The shots in between, routine indoor kids-and-pets candids, were slightly less impressive, in ways that are a bit hard to quantify (except to say they kept the Nikon from getting one of our ultra-rare five- instead of four-star ratings) -- they looked more point-and-shootish, a bit softer than those of the Olympus D-510 Zoom we tested in July. Or, to put it another way, while no 2-megapixel digital camera yields images you'll eagerly print at 8 by 10 inches, you'll be even more likely to order 5 by 7-inch frames for the Nikon's.

But as long as you underline the fact that it's a 2- rather than 4-megapixel camera, the Coolpix 775 is a very appealing one -- its scene modes, best shot selection, and one-button upload are genuine pluses; its standard rechargeable battery and charger are major bonuses; and its diminutive size is downright winsome.

Pros:

• Itty-bitty size
• Rechargeable battery and charger included -- that's $40 or $50 worth of value right there
• Scene exposure modes and best shot selection are great improvements on generic point-and-shoot

Cons:

• Slightly soft, "merely 2-megapixel" image quality is a letdown compared to other features
• Typical bare-minimum 8MB instead of larger memory card
• No uncompressed or TIFF image mode; no sound in video clips