In terms of performance, this diminutive snapper from Nikon stole the show. In natural daylight, it offered superb quality and detail on our landscape shots, and its 12 megapixels and 5x optical zoom brilliantly captured every kind of shot we experimented with. We also put it through its paces indoors, shooting portraits under artificial light on a dark, wintry evening – not an unusual situation but one that pushes a compact camera like this to its limits. The Nikon fared admirably – not every photo it took was great but some ranked among the best, showing that it's worth taking several shots and cherry-picking the best.

As well as the quality of snaps, the device itself impresses. It's the smallest of all the cameras we tested – a truly pocketable model. It's ready to take pictures less than a second after being switched on and stores snaps on standard SD memory cards.

The only niggle we have is that the control dial for the on-screen menus can be used either as a directional button or as a scroll wheel. We found that this dual functionality actually hindered changing settings on the camera because you had to make your mind up about which way to use it. But it's a minor point on an otherwise fantastic camera, that is very well tuned to what's really important in a model of this class and size.