Do wide angle (Nikon) lenses offer a significant benefit over compact zoom lenses?

My Nikon 12mpix L105, a Black Friday 100$ special, has a 15x Nikkor wide optical zoom vr lense. Happy enough with it. If I purchased another model with a "regular" lense, let's say also 15x (though if I trade up I'll likely want more zoom), would there be any difference in my photos? I'm not a photographer in any sense. Just wondering. More convenient to have a smaller camera (I'm tired of clutter, only want 1 of anything, I've contemplated just buying a 2nd). Decided not to buy a dslr anytime soon. As I said I'm not a photographer.

Ok it seems you are a little confused here. When a lens is described as 15X than you should consider that to be the range, not an absolute. So on most cameras a 15X zoom lens will cover the distance from wide to telephoto. If you balanced a drinks can on a wall and took a photo of it zoomed fully in the drinks can would appear 15x larger than if you took the same photograph with the lens at it's widest. Zoom just means that the lens focal length is variable, so in my own kit bag I've a couple of "zoom" lenses where that zoom is only around 2X. So unless you know the details of the effective focal lengths of the cameras, buying another camera with a zoom lens would just be a waste, unless it fulfilled some other want, such as being small enough to fit into a pocket!

Point-and-shoot/compact cameras usually have zoom lenses. All of those zoom lenses start at wide angle. All of them! There's no standardization of how wide a compact zoom lens must start from so there will be slight variations of angle of view with different compact cameras. They all however will be more or less the same.

Zoom is nothing more than the ability of the lens to change angle of view. The more zoom a lens has, the lower its optical quality. Don't worry much about that though because when it comes to picture quality, user skill is the one that affects it most. The lens and camera are only tools. Zoom amounts does not affect picture quality as much as use skill does.

The zoom "x" power, such as your 15x zoom is an arbitrary figure. It is just a ratio of the longest focal length to the shortest. So there are many different lens combinations that can equal 15x.

Buying another camera that is 15x is no assurance the zoom range will be the same.

You have to look at the focal lengths. Focal length is the optical measurement of the lens length, and as you zoom in and out, you change focal lengths. Short focal lengths are wide angle, and long focal lengths are telephoto.

Your camera has a focal length of 5mm to 75mm, meaning that at the wide angle end, the lens is optically 5mm long, and at the telephoto end, it is 75mm long. And 75/5 = 15, which is where the 15x comes from.

So you want to look for a lens that covers at least 5~75mm if you wan the same coverage as your camera.

So, say you wanted to look at a Nikon S9050, which has a 15.5x lens, which is close to your camera in zoom power. However, it's focal length is 4.5mm to 69.8mm, which means it will have a slightly wider angle at the short end, and not quite as much telephoto at the long end.

One thing you need to realize though, there's a lot more going on in a camera than just the zoom power. In fact, any time you go above around 7x or so in a compact camera, the lens quality starts to diminish. Higher power zoom lenses tend to be optically deficient, and you will lose sharpness in the images.

This is a problem with all lenses, even $1, 000 DSLR lenses; the higher the zoom power, the worse the lens.

So to get the best camera for your dollar, look at buying a higher quality camera.two such cameras are the Nikon P310 and P330. The P330 has replaced the P310 and is a superior camera, but even so, the P310 is much superior to the L105.

In the Nikon lineup, "L" series cameras are the entry level low end cameras, "S" are the everyday cameras, and the "P" series are the high-end cameras.

While the zooms of either the P310 and P330 are less powerful, they are much better lenses, and they also let in more light, so they excel in low-light photos. And since you have a camera that already has a decent zoom, why not buy one that will take better photos to complement what you already have. No sense in buying two cameras with the same kind of lens.

You can probably get the P310 on discount. Amazon has them for under $200. But they are going fast at that price as this is left over stock (the camera was discontinued in March 2013).

http://www.amazon.com/...0073HSH08/

The P330, it's replacement is still almost $400.