Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z1080 review

The Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z1080 is a 10.1-megapixel compact, following on the heels of the excellent EX-Z1200. The Z1080 shares many of the Z1200's features, but clocks in at a more affordable £160.

Design
The EX-Z1080 is available in grey, black, blue or pink. Ours was black, and shares the rubberised brick feel of the EX-Z1200, with a matte gunmetal strip around the edge. It's extremely sturdy, although it looks a bit bland at the front.

It looks great at the back, with a wide 66mm (2.6-inch) LCD screen dominating and a silver clickpad to the right. There are only two other buttons: a menu and a scene mode selector -- labelled 'best shot' -- which are both too small. This minimalist approach to buttons makes Casio's continued policy of using two buttons to choose between shooting and playback a bit odd, as one would do.

Features
The Z1080 is bursting with features. Face detection can be customised to prioritise saved faces of friends and families. Focus can be manually controlled or set to specific focus distances. There is a soft flash option, and flash intensity can be adjusted. Colour, sharpness and dynamic range can also be tweaked.

The self timer has a handy onscreen countdown, and includes the option to take three pictures at the end of a 10-second interval. There's even a selection of five different noises for each of the camera's operations.

The Casio's large screen and uncluttered control layout is great, as is the option to customise the clickpad into hotkeys

You get a choice of 41 scene modes, although some, like 'white board', probably won't see much action. There is a bit of overlap in several of the modes, such as the short movie and past movie modes, which both record a few seconds of footage from before you press the shutter. Meanwhile, YouTube mode is just a fancy name for a 30 frames per second-VGA movie shooting, which doesn't really merit a sticker on the front, but you do get some nifty and hassle-free uploader software.

The exposure compensation option is slightly odd, giving you a small window to gauge the changes you make rather than previewing changes live on the screen. You can however assign this function to the customisable left and right buttons of the clickpad, which puts shooting options like white balance and ISO settings at your fingertips.

We take issue with the word 'zoom' in the titles of some of the Exilim range. The Z1080 boasts a very ordinary 3x optical zoom, equivalent to a rather poor 38-114mm on a 35mm film camera.