Exilim EX-Z77 - An decent little play/travel camera!

An introduction to where I'm coming from and small cameras in general

I'm a more serious amateur photographer. I shoot with a Canon EOS Rebel XT (which I've never reviewed on here but keep meaning to). I totally love that camera. I have never been a fan of point and shoot cameras, like this Casio or any other small camera. There are too many trade-offs. The image quality is very poor, the lenses are slow and the cameras are almost worthless when used inside. This Casio is no exception to those unfortunate rules. However, my heart has started to warm to the concept of small point and shoot cameras. There are many places I don't take my SLR, hence I get NO shot when if I had a tiny camera I could have at least got a shot. Also, most miniature digicams such as this one can take video, and with the popularity of YouTube I wanted the ability to make YouTube videos I could post.

So I set off to find the perfect miniature digicam to supplement my SLR...

Here were my requirements...

- Small size - easily pocketable
- Ability to record a large amount of video to a card - many digicams use MJPEG, which looks good but you can only fit a few minutes in a gigabyte of storage! This requirement, unfortunately, ruled out my favorite brand - Canon. All of their little digicams use the MJPEG format and have it's resulting huge files
- Decent quality snapshots.

Everything else was gravy...

Why I chose the Casio EX-Z77

Because the first Samsung L830 I bought was defective :) As much as I liked the little Samsung, it felt fragile and receiving a defective one certainly put me off! So I exchanged it for this Casio, which was the same price and also met my requirements. It has some pros and cons vs. the Samsung. I don't find it quite as stylish as the Samsung, the sensor is slightly lower resolution and 1 stop lower sensitivity (800 ISO max instead of 1600 ISO max). And the LCD display is far, far worse but more on that later.

What I like about the Casio

- Video quality is fantastic! If you want to see some video shot on it, check out this video from church service last night - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8nyPalC-Gg - I was playing with the camera there. Note that the video off the camera is MUCH sharper, the blurriness is YouTube's compression, not the camera! The video really is TV quality (note - the VIDEO not the audio, which is quite bad).

- Pictures taken outdoors are decent. Like all miniature digicams, this Casio truly excels outside.

- Pocketable

What I don't like about the Casio

- Hard to learn - it took me quite awhile to FIND the video mode (you push the button that says "BS" - who would guess that?)

- Low sensitivity and poor noise performance, but this is par for the course on small digicams.

- Awful sound quality. The videos are great, but as you can hear in that example I posted on YouTube above - the sound is awful!

Okay, now lets look at different qualities of the camera:

Picture Quality

Picture quality on this Casio is what you would expect from a $160 digicam - quite poor. These little cameras have tiny sensors that aren't able to collect very much light, and poor quality lenses that also do a poor job. ANY little digicam like this is purely useful for snapshots.

However, this Casio has a redeeming function I truly like. Many people have a hard time making full use of their camera because they don't know how to set up the exposure properly. Casio included a function called "Best Shot" - by pushing the "BS" button, you can choose from 41 shooting modes. And unlike the modes on some cameras, these modes seem to actually choose intelligent settings for the situation you pick. And 41 modes is far more than most other cameras. This is a huge thumbs up that will help most users get the best out of this camera's limited natural ability. It will not, however, change the fact that this camera just isn't capable of truly great images, especially indoors.

Outside, where there is lots of light to grab, you might get a good - if not terribly artistic due to the huge depth of field (amount of area in focus) - image. Inside, you have choices. You can set the camera to it's highest ISO - 800. But the noise is far worse than 800 ISO film and far far worse than 800 ISO on a good digital SLR. 1600 ISO on my Rebel XT looks far better than 800 on this Casio. But that is to be expected. I'm glad Casio didn't include 1600 for marketing - some small digicams do, but it's useless it is so noisy.

The other choice is to use a flash. Which would be useful if the camera had a flash worth using. Like ALL tiny cameras, this Casio has an incredibly weak flash right beside the lens. The placement results in major red-eye problems, and the weak output results in a flash that only covers a few feet from the camera. It's good for snapshots of friends and absolutely nothing else.

Overall, I think the picture is good for it's class - which is strictly snapshot/play.

Video Quality

Here is where this camera makes a very impressive showing - it's video quality is as good as most small miniDV camcorders. Unfortunately, clips are limited to ten minutes (though you can put over an hour total on a 2GB card). This isn't a huge deal as a truly enjoyable video is edited out of much shorter clips measured in seconds. Still, if you wanted to record one long speech or something, you can't - and for no apparent reason!

The camera records video in H.264 format, which Apple and YouTube are pushing strongly and it even has a little YouTube icon. Unfortunately, the newest iMovie can't edit the files (the older one can) so if you're a Mac user you'll either need to keep using iMovie 6 or buy QuickTime Pro to convert the files.

The audio is a mono, 22KHz wav type track that sounds horrible. The built in microphone is poor and it's just a bad situation on the audio front all-around. Plan on dubbing over your videos or adding a music track to make the audio tolerable :)

Ease of use

This camera is quite counter-intuitive at first. To get video mode, you push the "BS" key. Who would expect THAT? BS (best shot) does turn out to be a good friend as I noted above. The menu system as a whole is weird, confusing, and ugly. This is all made worse by a low-resolution, poor quality LCD viewfinder screen. Compared to the elegance of Canon (even their cheapest), this is a joke.

However, once you're used to it and have it figured out, everything is only a few button presses away and the best shot mode makes it much easier for your average person to get the best picture the camera is capable of. This redeems the steep learning curve.

Overall

Despite it's shortcomings, this camera is a good value for the money that won't break the bank and is easy to carry with you anywhere. It's not a camera for the artist, it's a camera for family snapshots. Once you learn it, it will serve you as well as anything else in this class, it has a great video mode, and it's design is quite nice. I would recommend it.