Casio Exilim EX-Z200 review

Other features include a soft flash to keep a cosy look in lower light, rather than harshly bleaching out subjects. Night-time options also include a long 4-second shutter that captures the stars or turns moving lights into fancy patterns.

Casio continues its YouTube branding tie-up with its video option. The Z200 records H.264 video, with 30 frames per second at 640x480 pixels. These can be uploaded to YouTube or watched in 16:9 on your television. Prerecord video mode records video constantly and when you press the shutter, it saves the previous 5 seconds of video.

Performance
Start-up time is the usual 2 seconds, with a shot-to-shot time of 1 second after that. Focusing is fast, even in low light and we took over 300 shots without troubling the battery. Continuous mode is nothing to write home about, recording 1 frame per second at full resolution. As is often the case, a faster option is available, but only at a pretty derisory 2-megapixel resolution.

Image quality was good, if not as crisp as we would like. Depending on your taste, you might consider increasing the in-camera sharpening. Optical image stabilisation made a definite difference, which distinguishes the Z200 from other point-and-shoots that don't yet include this feature.

Low-light performance is reasonable but not great. The Z200 focuses fine, but like most compacts, is all too keen to ramp up the sensor's sensitivity to light to improve visibility. Though the ISO maxes out at 1,600, the Z200 struggles with anything higher than ISO 400: image noise horribly speckles the picture. At ISO 200, noise reduction manages to keep artefacts from ruining things without smearing detail too much, but above images really suffer.

The Z200 also exhibited more purple fringing than we'd like, but we had to manufacture it by taking high-contrast images such as trees against a light sky. Images are easily good enough for the average consumer and definitely good enough for online sharing. We're just disappointed that such a polished point-and-shoot isn't quite perfect on the image front.

Conclusion
We struggle to fault the Casio Exilim EX-Z200, as the topmost entry to one of the current best range of compacts. Image quality isn't perfect, but isn't by any means the worst we've seen from a snapper this size. It ticks almost every box on the point-and-shoot wishlist, the solid build quality and delightfully simple controls of the Exilim range joined by a big screen, wide-angle lens and stacks of features. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35 boasts an even wider lens for a similar price, but few other compacts come close to the Casio in terms of features and usability.

Edited by Shannon Doubleday