Despite an admirably quick shutter, the Z1200 suffers from generally sluggish performance. After a 2.3 second wait from power-on to first shot, the camera took 3.1 seconds between every shot, and 3.3 seconds with the onboard flash enabled. Burst mode fared similarly slowly, shooting only seven full-resolution photos in almost 11 seconds for a rate of just 0.64 frame per second. That said, the camera's shutter lagged a scant 0.5 second with our high-contrast target and just 1.1 seconds with our low-contrast target.
The Z1200's 12-megapixel stills generally look very good. The high resolution lets fine details, such as small text and hair, come through quite clearly. While it lacks any sort of high-sensitivity setting to really test it, noise tends to stay incredibly low in almost all of our shots. A gentle grain starts to appear at ISO 400, but you probably won't even notice it unless you make very large prints.
If you can get past its slow shot-to-shot time, the Casio Exilim EX-Z1200 makes a very nice high-resolution snapshot camera. Its pictures look great, and their high resolution mean you can blow them up much more than with lower-resolution photos. Higher ISO sensitivity settings and a stronger or wider lens would have been nice, but even without those features, the Z1200 serves well as a point-and-shoot.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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