Casio Exilim EX-S600

Auto Mode (6.5)
The EX-S600 is an automatic camera. It offers a fully automated mode and more than 30 scene modes. Exposure, ISO, White Balance, and focus can all be automated.

The EX-S600's exposures were generally usable, though we found that they were not entirely consistent – some of our outdoor shots were overexposed – too bright – and many of our shots in low light were too dark. Many point-and-shoot cameras tend to be sloppy in this regard. However, for many snapshooters, this may suffice.

Movie Mode (7.25)
The EX-S600 saves movies as MPEG-4 files. It offers two quality levels at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second, and one quality level at 320 x 240 pixels and 30 frames per second. The Anti Shake option is available in movie mode. The Past Movie function saves buffered video from the 5 seconds before the user starts making a movie. The EX-S600 allows the user to takes still snapshots while making a movie, though our effort at that interrupted the video. The video component of the EX-S600 may be the strongest imaging attribute on the camera.

Casio notes that a 1GB SD card will hold an hour of video, and that the EX-S600's battery will shoot about 1 hour and 50 minutes of video.

For users considering how they might enjoy their EX-S600 videos, "Motion Print" will convert a movie into a series of 9 still shots – or just one – for printing.

Drive / Burst Mode (4.0)
The EX-S600 has a burst mode. Casio says its performance depends on the memory media in the camera. we found its performance slow in all mode, taking over a second and a half between successive shots.

Playback Mode (7.75)
The EX-S600 offers a range of display features including a calendar view to find images based on the date shot, a 9-shot thumbnail mode, and a full-screen mode, with image data, shooting data, or without data. The screen will enlarge images up to 8x, though the poor quality of the screen limits its usefulness for evaluating images.

Casio incorporated a range of options into the EX-S600's slide show. The user can choose to show all images, just stills, just movies, or just favorites. It also offers three transitions: cross fade, fade to white, and shutters. The user can set a length of time for the whole show, and a length of time for each still image.

Custom Image Presets (9.0)
The EX-S600 has 34 custom image presets. They aren't all useful, but it's remarkable how many Casio thought of.

There are standard ones, such as Portrait, Scenery, Portrait with Scenery, Sports, Night Scene, Night Scene Portrait, Fireworks, Backlight, High Sensitivity, Monochrome and Twilight. These modes adjust exposure, ISO, color, sharpening and so on to match common conditions for each type of photo.

The EX-S600 also has an "Anti Shake," mode, which increases the ISO setting to allow faster shutter speeds. Its "Old photo" mode boosts colors, squares up right angles and allows cropping, for copying old snapshots.

The EX-S600 allows custom scene modes. By selecting an image in memory, the user can create a mode that matches the settings in place when the selected image was taken. In an example of customization unlikely to be matched soon, and unlikely to ever be used, the EX-S600 can record up to 999 such modes.

The EX-S600's other modes are broadly similar to the basic ones. They are: Children, Candlelight Portrait, Party, Pet, Flower, Natural Green, Autumn Leaves, Soft Flowing Water, Splashing Water, Sundown, Food, Text, Collection, Retro, Business cards and documents, White board, etc.

The EX-S600 also has four Best Shot Movie modes: Silent, Short Movie, Past Movie, and Voice Recording. "Past Movie" takes advantage of the camera's video buffer. When the movie button is pressed, it saves the previous 5 seconds of video, which are in the camera's buffer, to memory, and then continues to record. It's also possible to save custom Best Shot modes for video.