Casio EXILIM EX-Z750 Digital Camera

The Casio Exilim EX-Z570 made me a little leery, for the same reason I am leery of Mitsubishi. I worry about the products of a company that makes cars and televisions, or in this case cheap watches and cheap keyboards. However, it is a nice little camera, fairly flexible, but still simple. But it is a little camera. It's obviously not going to have the range of a more expensive camera, but how many people really need all the bells and whistles that are on the more expensive cameras.

The body of this camera is small and sleek. It'll fit in a shirt pocket, but because it's so small, it's hard to shoot one handed. There's very little to hang onto. If you do attempt to hold it with one hand you risk switching the AE compensation or the flash by mistake. If you hold it with 2 hands it's nice. There's a tiny flash over and to the left of the lens. It's pretty wimpy as flashes go. The zoom lens retracts flat into the camera when you're not using it, which is pretty nice for the whole sticking it in your pocket issue.

The viewfinder is a 2.5-inch screen and really fast. Take a shot and it turns up on the screen almost immediately. Unfortunately, this nice big viewfinder doesn't have the greatest resolution and it becomes totally useless in bright light leaving you to have to rely on the optical viewfinder. The optical viewfinder only shows about 3 quarters of the scene, which I didn't like at all. By the way, you can turn off the LCD screen completely, which I liked.

It has all the usual suspects for buttons, but the one I really liked was the EX button for getting to a mini menu fast. The mini menu covers file size, white balance, ISO and auto focus area. What that means is that you can get a little control very quickly.

Because it's so small a lot of the controls are tucked into menus making that EX button really important. This camera can do a lot, but some how the menus aren't terrifying. I'm one of those people who panics when I hit the wrong button on my TV remote and these screens didn't intimidate me. It does have a lot of presets so you don't have to remember all the settings for each individual shooting situation. 30 total including "user custom." Personally, I like the presets, but I'm a technological idiot. It took me 2 years to figure out how to put HTML into my Epinions! My husband hates the presets because he spent many years working as an artist and designer so he likes to set his own. This did allow him enough flexibility while allowing me to be stupid (and not making fun of me for it.) The provided software is pretty useless. The memory is only 32 MB.

The battery must be charged in the cradle. It's held in place with a little latch so it's very secure. Needing the carry the cradle around on vacation could be a major pain, but once the battery is charged up you can get 325 shots which is nothing to sneeze at. It takes about 3 hours to charge from totally dead. The cradle is also how you connect to your computer or printer and I guess there's a way to connect it to your TV if you want to do a big screen slide show.

My husband liked the accuracy of the contrast and the white balance. Everything came out very true looking. This camera also allowed us to fiddle with the white balance after we saved the pictures. Reduced the number of retakes when the light did come out funny. The color can get a little oversaturated, but I kind of liked that and you can work with that in Photoshop if you don't. In photos with really extreme contrast you may end up with a little purple outline. Personally I didn't mind it, but my husband hated it.

This is a good camera for anyone who wants to take vacation snaps of still objects, especially if you like very bright images. This isn't a great camera for fast moving objects like children. Unfortunately having to drag the cradle around the world is a major detractor for me. But the battery life when it's charged is a huge bonus.

Specs:
7.2 Megapixel CCD
3x optical zoom lens
High speed start up and operation
2.5-inch TFT screen and optical viewfinder
MPEG-4 movies at up to 640x480 / 30fps
30 Best Shot scene modes
325-shot battery life (CIPA standard)
In-camera special effects
Post-shot white balance and exposure adjustments
Aperture priority, shutter priority and manual exposure options
EX button for fast access to shooting controls