The Casio Z1050 looks like almost every other point-and-shoot with its boxy measurements and extending 3x optical zoom lens. But the Z1050 has something most other slim cameras don’t: 10.1 megapixels. This Exilim has purely Automatic modes, few Manual controls, and retails for $269.

The camera has a large LCD screen on a compact body, leaving almost no room for anything else. Thus there is no mode dial and the limited number of buttons are tiny. Because there is no mode dial, all Exposure modes are grouped in a menu. There are 36 Scene modes along with all-purpose Automatic and Movie modes. The Scene modes range from the standard Portrait and Scenery options to the wacky Splashing Water and For eBay modes. Unfortunately, like other point-and-shoot digital cameras, most of the modes produced blurry or unfocused pictures.

The Movie mode records 640 x 480 pixels at 25 fps, just short of the 30 fps most digital cameras - such as the Canon A640 and Samsung S1050 - offer. This makes for slightly choppy movement, but it’s really only noticeable with quick-moving subjects. For instance, I recorded my son dumping a bucket of sand onto the ground. His arms weren’t blurred at all, but the sand looked strange as it appeared just under the bucket and then on the ground without any fluid falling motion between. A few advantages of the Movie mode: you can pull individual frames and create still images from them, albeit very small, and you can perform simple editing tasks to cut the film down to include only what you want.

Casio advertises a 7 fps Burst mode, but the fine print is that it only goes fast at very limited resolution. At 2 megapixels, you can’t even print a decent 4x6-inch picture. The “normal speed” Burst mode is abnormally slow: it took nearly 3 seconds between shots. The EX-Z1050 is not made for snapping a home run or touchdown, as it will miss the action 9 out of 10 times. A more reliable Burst mode is on the 10-megapixel Canon A640, which has a longer 4x lens and a 1.5 fps full-resolution Burst mode. The Casio Z1050 has a really cool tracking autofocus mode that locks the focus and then moves around with the subject, even when the camera isn’t moving. This would have been useful with action shots, but is disabled when the Burst mode is activated.

The Casio Exilim Z1050’s body measures 3.6 x 2.3 x 0.95 inches and comes in pink, blue, silver, and black. It is quite boxy but its 3x optical zoom lens extends outward so it isn’t completely flat all the time. The back of the camera has a strangely formatted 14:9 LCD screen that measures 2.6 inches diagonally and has only 115,000 pixels. Because none of the images are formatted to that size, there are always black bars cropping the view to what it should be – or a panel display in place of the black bars that shows basic recording features like image size and ISO, among others. The resolution on the screen isn’t very good so it’s hard to tell if the image is in focus. The Panasonic LX2 has a true 16:9 widescreen LCD screen that measures 2.8 inches and has 210,000 pixels.

The LCD screen isn’t the only cheap component. The flash is quite weak, reaching only 10.8 feet when the lens is zoomed out and 5.91 feet when the lens is zoomed in. The flash produces a vignette effect so the edges of the frame are slightly darker. When the flash is turned on, it almost always brightens the subject but leaves the background looking completely black. There is, however, a handy flash assist feature that saves the background by upping the ISO setting. This looks great unless big prints are made; the higher the ISO climbs, the more speckled random “noise” creeps into the picture.

The Casio Exilim EX-Z1050 is unimpressive and thus wades in the dregs with the vast numbers of cheap point-and-shoot digital cameras on the market. It isn’t especially good-looking, but comes in four colors and has a standard 3x optical zoom lens. It really doesn’t have any distinguishing features. Its 10.1 megapixels is an attention-getter, but who wants humongous images of blurry people? The $269 price tag is too much to pay for low-quality pictures.