Casio Exilim EX-S770

Viewfinder (0.0)
The wide LCD screen doesn’t leave room for an optical viewfinder, but users of this camera wouldn’t want one of those anyway. The large live view on the screen is nice and bright. It seems to stay that way no matter what the surrounding circumstances are. The bright view is complimented by great screen resolution and a fast enough refresh rate on the electronic screen so that moving subjects won’t blur. The live view doesn’t take up the entire screen no matter which aspect ratio or image size is chosen. When a picture is taken, the live view blacks out for almost a half-second. Nevertheless, the live view is helpful and accurate.

LCD Screen (7.5)
The Casio S770’s LCD screen measures a wide 2.8 inches on the back of the camera. It has 230,000 pixels, thus making live or playback images look crystal clear. The picture is bright whether in daylight or low light. It automatically gains up and down when the lighting changes when it’s in the default auto brightness setting. There are other brightness options, detailed below in the display menu. The LCD can be seen from side to side easily, but it turns negative when held above or below the head. The images on the LCD screen didn’t always fit in the 2.8-inch area because of the different aspect ratios and the vertical menus that appear while recording. I didn’t find this too disturbing, but picky photographers may desire a more unobstructed view.

The LCD screen’s view is affected by the Display button atop the camera. When pushed, a little menu appears with live views. It consists of the following.

The live view with this menu is very helpful in choosing proper display settings, especially when picking the "type." These can be deceiving, though, as the final image won’t be recorded looking as "vivid" or "dynamic" as the screen’s depiction indicates. Overall, the screen size is great and the resolution very helpful in viewing live feed and images in the playback mode.

Flash (6.5)
The S770 has a thin built-in flash unit that sits to the left of the lens when viewing from the front. The off-axis placement keeps fingers from wandering into its way, and the coverage isn’t too lop-sided. There is a definite bright spot in the middle of the frame that shows up when photographing shiny subjects – and sometimes shows on foreheads in portraits. The flash can cast stark highlights and shadows, but there is a Soft Flash mode that reduces the glaring effect. Other flash modes include Auto, On, Off, and Red-Eye Reduction. The flash isn’t incredibly powerful; it reaches from 6 inches to 12.8 ft at best (when at the widest focal length). When the lens is zoomed in, the flash range shortens to 1.3-6.6 ft. There is a way to manually soften the flash’s effect via the Flash Intensity control in the recording menu, and it can be set in whole steps on a +/- 2 scale.

In the recording menu, the burst mode can be changed to "flash continuous." The S770 can shoot 3 pictures in a second using the flash, but the flash range shortens to 0.9-5.5 ft (wide) and reaches only 2.9 ft when zoomed in. This won’t be practical for snapping photos at a basketball game – even if you do have front-row seats. It will be handy, however, for capturing baby’s first few steps in a room that needs new light bulbs.

Zoom Lens (6.5)
The Casio Exilim EX-S770 is equipped with a 3x optical zoom lens that telescopes outward from the camera body in three segments. Internally, the lens is composed of six lenses in five groups with one of those lenses being aspheric to reduce distortion. It appears to have worked fairly well. The S770’s lens doesn’t show much barrel distortion, faring better than most competitors’ lenses that almost look like fisheyes in the macro mode. Perhaps part of the reason barrel distortion can’t be seen is that the macro mode doesn’t focus as closely as other lenses do. Most can focus within an inch, but the S770 can’t focus any closer than 5.9 inches.

The 6.2-18.6mm lens, equivalent to 38-114mm, is controlled by a lever-type button shaped like a vertical rectangle. The lever doesn’t have much differentiation from the wide zoom on the bottom to the telephoto zoom at the top. There is a tiny engraved line in the middle, but users will most likely have to look and see where their thumbs are pushing rather than just feeling it out. When the control is pushed, a horizontal graphic display appears on the LCD screen to indicate where users are in the zoom range. There are six focal lengths available in the range, which is about what the average lens offers. The lens zooms in well, but when it moves from telephoto to wide, it breathes in and out a little when settling on a focal length. The most noticeable aspect of the lens is its sound. It makes a whirring electronic noise that won’t stop a Broadway show, but it would definitely keep you from sneaking a picture in a ballet performance. Overall, the lens does what it is supposed to. I wish it was longer and quieter, but it still works well as the eye of the S770.