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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 60 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Small size; 21 useful scene modes; decent macro capabilities; large LCD; doubles as a voice recorder; excellent battery life.
The bad: Picture quality only average; no burst or sports mode.
The bottom line: This ultracompact 4-megapixel Casio provides only average picture quality, but its outstanding battery life and versatile scene modes should appeal to roving snapshooters.
Specifications: Digital camera type: Ultracompact ; Resolution: 4 megapixels ; Optical zoom: 3 x ; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 11/05/2004
- Released on: 04/01/2004
However, this Casio offers mediocre image quality and lacks most of the control over exposure settings that more-advanced photographers demand. Its lack of shutter-speed adjustments, a sports scene mode, or a burst mode will cool the enthusiasm of sports and action photographers, too. Snapshooters who want a versatile camera to tuck in a pocket may be satisfied, but more-serious picture-takers will be happier with a fuller-featured camera.
With its lens fully retracted into its 5.5-ounce aluminum body and protected by a built-in lens cover, the Casio Exilim EX-Z40 will fit in most any pocket. Pull out its compact 3.4-by-2.2-by-0.9-inch body, press the top-mounted power switch, and you're ready to shoot. The Exilim EX-Z40's control layout makes it easier than with most cameras that are this small to place an index finger comfortably on the shutter release while resting your thumb on the back-panel zoom rocker, but we still liked to grip this Casio with both hands while shooting.The large 2-inch LCD dominates the back surface; the only other controls to fuss with are buttons above the LCD that switch between the playback and record modes, the menu and display keys located to the right of the display, and a four-way cursor pad with an embedded, center Set button.
Many frequently used functions can be adjusted with the cursor pad. Pressing in the "up" direction cycles through normal autofocus, macro focus, infinity, manual focus, and panfocus, which locks in a focus setting to reduce shutter lag. The down button cycles through flash options and the function to delete the last photo taken. The left/right buttons default to changing the recording mode--including scene modes, since there is no mode dial--but when we weren't switching between different scene types frequently, we found it more useful to assign these keys to applying exposure compensation. Alternatively, you can program the left/right keys to set the white balance, the ISO, or the self-timer.
If you're not using the left/right keys to change scene modes, you can accomplish the same thing with a quick trip to the Exilim EX-Z40's well-designed menu system, which is divided into Record, Memory, and Setup screens when you're shooting, and Play and Setup when you're reviewing pictures. If you've been infuriated by digital cameras that "forget" all your settings when you turn the camera off, you'll love the Casio's Memory feature, which can recall the recording, flash, and focus modes; the white balance and ISO settings; the autofocus adjustment; the digital zoom status; and even the manual focus or zoom positions that were set when the camera was last powered down.Although it lacks a sequence-shooting burst mode and key manual settings other than focus, the Casio Exilim EX-Z40 is packed with other useful features. The real grabber is the Best Shot mode, which comes with 21 different flavors of scene choices that will set optimum exposures and other image parameters for a large variety of shooting situations.
Casio's Best Shot offers a wealth of scene modes. There are standard options such as Portrait and Night Scene, as well as less typical ones such as Collection, a macro mode with outlines for aligning your subjects, and Coupling Shot, which combines two pictures so that you can include yourself with your companion. Register Favorites lets you save the settings from any of your own pictures as custom Best Shot scene modes. The Exilim EX-Z40 can also set exposures with a generic programmed automatic mode, using shutter speeds from 4 seconds to 1/2,000 second, and apertures ranging from f/2.6 to f/4.3.
The 3X optical zoom lens provides decent wide-angle capabilities and moderate telephoto range with a 35mm-to-105mm span (35mm-camera equivalent.) Your choice of spot focusing or seven-point multi-area focusing brings you down to as close as 16 inches in regular mode, and from 2.7 to 19.7 inches in macro mode. It's easy to fine-tune focus manually: press the up key to cycle to Manual Focus, then press the left or right keys to adjust focus on the central area of the image, which is enlarged on the LCD as you set the distance.
Flash range is adequate, with a range of 1.6 to 11 feet at the wide-angle setting and 1.3 to 6 feet in tele mode, using autoflash, fill-flash, flash-off, and red-eye-reduction options. You can add audio annotations to accompany each still image or use the Casio as a voice recorder. It can save as much as 40 minutes of audio on its internal memory alone. Movies, with sound, can be captured at 320x240 pixels at 15fps up to the capacity of your available memory. Both white balance and sensitivity can be left on automatic or set by the user, with five white-balance options and ISO settings from ISO 50 to ISO 400.
This Casio's docking cradle serves triple duty as a charger for the lithium-ion battery, a camera-to-computer image transfer device, and means to activate a slide-show display of your camera's pictures on the 2-inch LCD screen. You can also create browser-ready HTML pages showcasing your images in any of 10 different layouts and using black, white, or gray backgrounds. Because the camera itself has no USB connector, you must use the cradle to transfer pictures via cable or use a card reader.
The Casio Exilim EX-Z40's time from power-up to first shot was a quick 2.1 seconds, and thereafter we were able to snap off pictures roughly every 3 seconds without flash, and every 4 seconds with flash. Shutter lag was average at 0.8 second under high-contrast lighting, and 1.1 seconds under low-contrast illumination, which typically bogs down the non-light-assisted autofocus system. However, when we used the panfocus option, which bypasses autofocus and applies the last focus setting used, shutter lag was reduced to a speedy 0.2 second.The optical viewfinder is on the smallish side and shows only 85 percent of the image with no diopter adjustment. We enjoyed using the large 2-inch LCD viewfinder to compose and evaluate images, although it was a little low in contrast outdoors in direct sunlight.
The 1,230mAh NP-40 battery should be good for at least a day or two of shooting. We managed to take almost 1,400 pictures on a single charge, half of them with flash and while using other power-hungry features such as zoom, slide-show display, picture review, and SD card reformatting.
While our test shots with the Casio Exilim EX-Z40 were acceptable, many of them were a little soft, lacking in sharpness and contrast, and suffering from relatively low saturation. There were more JPEG artifacts that we would have liked, as well as some noise that was especially visible in darker areas at higher ISO ratings. Indoors, automatic white balance sometimes produced a slight yellowish cast under incandescent illumination, but colors were truer with the flash. The red-eye reduction system worked well; we had few problems with glowing pupils in our flash pictures.- See more CNET content tagged:
- Casio Inc.
User reviews
- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 60 reviews
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
"Lens Error! Do a simple google for this camera, and you'll find the lens error problem everywhere!"
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
"Great Buy, Compact, Amazing Battery Life, Good Pic Quality"
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
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