Casio Exilim EX-Z850 Digital Camera Review
By Richard Baguley
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
December 28, 2006
The Casio Exilim EX-Z850 is a compact camera with an impressive set of features: housed in an attractive shiny metal case, there’s an 8-megapixel image sensor, a 3x optical zoom lens and 34 scene modes. That’s a bargain for less then $300.
The shiny case has a sleek and simple aesthetic appearance that belies the large set of features that the camera offers. The Exilim EX-Z850 has an optical viewfinder you can use to frame shots, so you don’t have to rely on the LCD screen. The back of the camera is dominated by the 2.5-inch LCD screen, which was a little disappointing: with only 115,000 pixels, images looked grainy, so it isn’t ideal for showing off images – it’s better to plug the camera into a TV for those birthday party slide shows. Images on the screen were easily viewable from most angles, but don’t handle this after downing a cheeseburger - the shiny screen’s surface showed off fingerprints too. If you want a better LCD screen, the 7.2-megapixel Panasonic FX50 has a smoother 3-inch screen with 230,000 pixels.
The other controls on the back of the camera are relatively straightforward: there are buttons for switching between playback and record mode, the mode dial, the menu button, a four-way control for navigating menus and controlling features such as focus and flash mode and a button that changes the display mode. This allows you to disable the screen if you need to extend the battery life, although this probably won’t be needed that much: Casio claims a battery life of 440 shots from the small lithium-ion rechargeable battery.
Although the mode dial and zoom controls are well placed and easy to use, the other controls require you to take your eye off the screen when shooting, which could lead to a lost shot. The on-screen menu is easy to navigate, with most of the options you’ll use often available by pressing the EX button on the left of the camera. From here, you can set options like image size, ISO setting and the AF mode with just a few button presses. The menu button next to the LCD screen provides access to the full menu for setting less commonly used options. Although this two-button arrangement may confuse some users, others argue that it helps them access frequently used options faster.
We found the quality of the images that the Casio Z850 captured to be a little disappointing. Colors were inaccurate, with blues in particular being oversaturated and way too vivid. The images were also lacking in detail; although the camera has an 8-megapixel image sensor, many fine details in our test images couldn’t be distinguished. This could be partly corrected by using the in-camera sharpening tool, but the images are just not as detailed as some other cameras with the same advertised resolution such as the Sony W100. We also found the Z850's images to be rather noisy, especially in low-light shooting, where areas of flat color became bumpy and grainy. The auto focus system also had problems focusing in low light, often failing to find the focus point. Better pictures in low light can be garnered from the Nikon S4, which also has a 10x lens and is still quite compact.
The Casio Exilim EX-Z850 can shoot movies with sound, which are recorded as MPEG-4 files at resolutions of 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second. Although the movies look acceptable, sound is an issue: the microphone picks up a lot of handling noise. A variety of scene modes for movies are offered, including portrait, fireworks and night scene. There’s also a rather interesting past movie mode, where the camera is constantly recording so that when you hit the shutter, 5 seconds of video from before that time are recorded and the camera continues recording.
The EX-Z850 is a mixed bag of a camera. There are handling problems such as the poorly placed controls and the image quality isn’t that great. But it is a small, convenient camera that is well priced for what you get.
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