Nikon Coolpix AW100

You wouldn't think that the Nikon AW100 is the company's first try at a rugged point-and-shoot. The 16-megapixel camera manages to do just about everything right—it captures sharp images, survives drops, geotags your photos, shoots underwater, and grabs 1080p30 video.

A 3-inch, 460k-dot LCD dominates the rear of the camera. It is very bright and sharp, making it easy to frame and review images in a variety of lighting conditions.

We used the Nikon Coolpix AW100 to take a photo of our standard test scene.

This 100 percent crop shows the level of detail that you can expect from the AW100.

The AW100 is the speediest rugged camera that we've tested. It can start up and grab a shot in 1.4 seconds, only requires 0.8 second of recycle time between photos, and records a 0.1-second shutter lag.

The camera has all the standard control buttons—including a zoom rocker, dedicated movie button, self timer, flash control, and exposure compensation—and adds a special control button on the left side of the camera, called the Action button.

I used Imatest to measure the camera's performance in terms of image sharpness and noise. The software analyzes a test chart as shot by the camera to deliver a center-weighted sharpness score, measured in lines per picture height. A score of 1,800 lines is considered to be very sharp, and the AW100 came in well above that metric—it recorded 2,166 lines.

You wouldn't know that the AW100 is Nikon's first attempt at a rugged camera from using it. The compact point-and-shoot feels polished and refined, and performs admirably on all fronts, earning our Editors' Choice award for rugged cameras.