P7100 - Dynamic Range & ADL

Just for the sake of completeness...

ADL stands for Active D-Lighting, or Nikon's implementation of in-camera DR compression by local curve tweaking (as opposed to a sensor-level process and differently from adjusting a global curve).

Here's a little presentation on the principle underlying it and also Olympus' shadow adjustment technology and Sony's dynamic range optimization: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2009/3/18/apical .

U3 is the 3rd memory slot for "User" settings. The three custom positions are quite nicely accessible on the mode dial.