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“I bought the Casio Exilim EX Z40 digital camera from...”

written by 4W4K3 on 19/01/2006

Good Points
Size
Lithium-ion battery with long life
Preset features
Ease of use
USB connectable

Bad Points
Movie quality
Integrated memory is small
Zoom is weak

General Comments
I bought the Casio Exilim EX Z40 digital camera from www.bananapc.com for $199.99 with free shipping about 2 years ago (I think). Good deal, fast shipping, good business.



Appearance is just plain sexy. The camera is mostly metal, with a solid construction and very stylish, well, style. It has a protected lens that opens and closes fast and without hesitation, and very easy to use navigation/controls.



The 2" screen is very bright inside, but can be very hard to see in direct sunlight. It seems bright enough for my uses, and is crisp and clear. The viewfinder is also an excellent feature; just make sure you clean it often, because after sitting in a pocket for a while lint/dust tends to build-up in the view finder.



As far as performance goes, I am pretty satisfied. Macro mode takes very clear pictures, and the flash works well on this camera. A down side to the flash is that it does take some time for it to "charge", if you shoot before the flash is ready it won't flash, obviously. Not a huge drawback though; I'm just impatient.



The vast amount of presets is amazing. It has modes for animal pictures, night time pictures, black and white, sepia, text, and food etc., the list goes on and on; and all of the modes seem to work VERY well (night pictures are my favorite).



Now for the bad...



The built-in memory is rather small. While you can take MASSIVE pictures, you will also run out of memory fast. I opted to buy a 512MB SD memory card because I like to take large resolution pictures, and I can hold about 600 with the largest resolution.



Also, movie quality isn't that great. You must be in a well lighted room to see anything in the video, and with a low fps rating, they aren't really movie quality. Of course, a camera is for pictures not movies, so this is somewhat of a mute point.



Zoom was the biggest downside to the camera. It has 3x optical and 4x digital zoom. That's a total of 12x zoom, and it's not too pretty. The optical zoom is great for me; just when I want to sneak in a bit closer for a picture, but using the digital zoom is kind of pointless. Shots usually turn out somewhat grainy when you zoom in all the way, and at 12x they appear "cloudy" for me. I almost never zoom in this much, but when I want to, it's kind of disappointing.



Overall, I would still recommend this camera to anyone who just wants a good point and shoot device. The picture quality is excellent, as long as you're not zooming excessively. Movies are average quality. Sound recording is good and useful, and the endless amounts of presets are convenient.



If you're looking for a camera designed more for "advanced" photographers, I'd look elsewhere.