Review: Casio Exilim Ex-Z80

Most digicams in the last couple of years came in a fixed form factor: just under an inch thick, about three and a half wide, and about 2 inches tall. Canon's satisfyingly blocky Elphs are the exemplar of it; others may have a swooping curve here or a sliding lens cover there, but that's the status quo. Casio, whose original Exilims were among the earliest decent concealed-carry digicams, finally bored of this clone army and issued the Z200, which is super-thin, and the EX-Z80, which keeps the thickness but trims the other dimensions.

The Ex-Z80 is teeny indeed—and, at about $200, cheap—so I picked one up to replace my dying SD1000. It's a decent 8.1-megapixel shooter with 3x optical zoom and some nice extras, but it isn't without shortcomings.

First, the good. God damn is this thing pretty. It has a vaguely retro air about it, at least in sensible colors, as if stolen from some over-funded 1970s Soviet espionage porn lab.

Its chassis is stylish and offered in black, pale shades of silver, red, blue or green, or hot pink. A bountiful 2.6" LCD panel is wedded to a simple, no-nonsense user interface, and there's a separate shoot button for videos to make quick-on-the-draw captures nice and easy. It can record 848x480 H.264 video at 30fps, or ready-to-upload YouTubes. In good light, the shots are great.

Unlike many small models, it has manual focus, and the myriad of shooting modes will be fun to mess around with for those who don't care for post-processing: there are practically dozens of them, from cheesy cartoonifiers to sepia toning and eBay-friendly fast-shutter snapshots.

The Z80's flaws, however, are hard to miss. Image quality heads well under par as the ISO setting goes up. The "auto-shutter" mode, which is supposed to wait until the scene is steady before shooting, seems to be complete garbage. The voice recording mode is also no good.

You can't manually set shutter speed, and it tends to opt for longer settings than I'm used to: steady hands are mandatory for flash-off indoor shots. The Exilim also uses micro-USB instead of mini-USB for its data jack.

Nonetheless, it takes good pictures, is smaller than everything else on the shelf that is not itself another Exilim, and costs less than $200. It's the perfect concealed carry for people who can't stand cellphone pictures, still want the bare minimum of weight and size, but want acceptable print quality and image control.

Product Page [Casio]