Casio Exilim EX-FC100

Handling (7.00)

The Casio EX-FC100 is 0.88 inches thick (22.4mm), but feels smaller due to its rounded edges and recessed holding area. It’s a bit light, but had enough heft that you don’t feel like it’s about to fall out of your hand. It’s small enough that it’ll fit into all but the tightest of pockets, and just generally looks and feels sleek.

Buttons & Dials (7.25)

The control layout on the EX-FC100 is frustrating, to say the least. There’s not a lot of space on a point-and-shoot of this size, and Casio definitely dropped the ball in terms of using it well. The layout feature that bugs us the most is that there are separate buttons for shooting and playback mode. The vast majority of cameras will switch between shooting and playback with a single button, as well as let you exit playback by pressing the shutter button. The Casio does neither, and uses up precious real estate by having the separate buttons for each. Likewise space could have been saved by having a mode dial/switch of some description instead of a high-speed button, switch for video resolution, and separate button for video recording. Given how small the controls are, a slightly better design with larger buttons would have gone a long way to making the shooting experience more pleasant and practical.

Menus (4.50)

The menu system isn’t abysmal, but has a few issues. The first is that the camera takes you out of the menu system whenever you change an option, which makes altering multiple settings a chore. Also, all of the menu levels have more than a page of options, which requires lots of scrolling. How the options are arranged makes little sense. Why is focus mode in the Record menu, but Metering in the Quality menu?

Quick Menu	Record Menu

Manual & Learning (3.75)

The printed manual that comes with the camera is worse than useless. The English section is a mere 22 pages long, and is trilingual in English, Spanish and French. Almost none of the features are covered, and there’s no discussion of the high speed mode at all. The table of contents only has nine entries, and there is no index.

On the other hand, the manual provided on CD (you can download a copy from Casio here) is pretty decent, quite well written, and actually explains what the camera does. However, it doesn’t do a stellar job of explaining some of the trickier settings, like the slow motion feature.