Casio Exilim EX-Z200

Opinion: The Casio Exilim Z200 is good, if you just want to make vacation pics or party pics.

It is capable of making perfect pictures in bright light when the smallest aperture is selected (f/8.0). Other pictures suffer from blurred images as if the the image is out of focus or motion blurred as I have read in other reviews (http://www.photographyblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/casio_ex_z200_review2/). Small text is not readable on a pixel level, while an 8MP Canon Digital Ixus 860 IS can make of the same scene readable text. Sharpening helps, but sharpening does not make text readable or faces smooth. At least with 10MP you can just resize the image to a perfect quality 2.5 MP image. Reducing to 6MP often already results in very nice images. Without flash the pictures always seem a bit blurred making it look as if the image was moved even though this camera got image stabilization. The flash is very bright and can really blind subjects. The ISO-noise is quite reasonable and does not suffer from Monet-pixelation scenes as I see Panasonic Camera's suffer from. The camera is pretty color true, although contrast sometimes needs to be increased by 20%, but that is not really a problem. There are some white balance settings, although they (can) make unrealistic looking images. There is hardly any chromatic aberration.

The video mode is reasonable. The H.264 codec does not deliver the sharpest image. The 640x480HQ resolution of a Canon Digital Ixus 860 is much sharper than this 848x480HQ resolution, which looks a bit like a cell shaded cartoon. Sound quality is good although playback on the camera of sound is very soft. Zooming while filming is not advised since the digital zoom the camera uses does not give you a sharper image.

The camera is very light and strong enough, but the controls feel a bit wiggly. You got to love the red color. The color, compactness, the H.264 movie and the wide-angle combo made me choose for this camera.

Selecting camera settings by the "Best shot" example scenes works reasonably although I'd rather have configuration of real presets where I can read off all settings. Here I still don't understand what factor makes a good picture and what not.

Looking at this camera with a professional eye, it gets a 5/10 due to the inconsistent (often in the poor regime) image quality, but looking with a tourist/digital life eye it gets a 7.5 due to the fact that 10MP is more than enough to compensate for noise and blur and you can take it everywhere with you (which really works, because I can get this camera in the heat of the moment, which makes telling stories to your friends afterwards so much fun if you have the images/videos to proof it).