|
The EX-Z1000 has no optical viewfinder. With such a large LCD, there's no place to put one. Casio has put very small viewfinders on previous Exilim cameras. They're hard to use, but some owners like to save battery power by shutting off the LCD and relying on the viewfinder. That's not an option here.
LCD Screen (8.0)
The Casio Z1000's 2.8-inch, 230,400-pixel LCD is wide format, something like HDTV, but not quite as radical a ratio. When the camera is shooting or displaying in 16:9 format, it letterboxes the image slightly, showing stripes of black above and below the image.
 Casio gives the user two options for using the interesting shape: it offers a “Panel” layout that displays a set of shooting parameters along the right side, allowing quick access to the settings with the 4-way controller. It also offers a more conventional layout, with shooting data superimposed on the image. In 16:9 mode, the Panel display still shows on the right side of the frame, decreasing the size of the displayed image. It's too bad that Casio didn't move the icons into a horizontal panel along the top or bottom of the frame in 16:9 mode – the image could have been much bigger, without a bunch of wasted space.
The LCD is very bright, and remains visible in bright sun. Outdoors, it's good enough to compose shots and read menus, but users still need shade to check images. Our sample showed up with one malfunctioning pixel, which glows bright blue as long as the camera is on.
We also found that the LCD preview accurately shows what will be in the final image. Many cameras' displays show less of the image than the camera shoots, but the Z1000's is close to spot-on.
Flash (6.0)
 The EX-Z1000's flash is tiny. If it was a coin slot - and that's about how it's shaped - it wouldn't be wide enough to take quarters. Small light sources give off harsh, unflattering light that accentuates wrinkles and blemishes, and they cast harsh shadows. Since the flash is to the right of the lens, as the user holds the camera, it will cast harsh shadows to the left of the subjects. If it were directly above the lens, it would cast shadows directly behind the subjects, and the shadows wouldn't appear as much in the pictures.
We found that the flash works out to about 12 feet when the Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 is set to ISO 400, and the zoom is at the wide setting. Zooming to telephoto cuts the range about in half. The flash illumination is pretty even, darkening only very close to the corners.
 Zoom Lens (6.0)The Casio Exilim Z1000's LCD and the 10.1-megapixel sensor may generate some excitement. That's good for Casio’s marketing, because it can gloss over the dull lens: a 3x optical zoom with barely any wide-angle end and quite moderate telephoto, its maximum aperture ranges from a healthy f/2.8 to a very dim f/5.4. It only has two aperture settings. At wide-angle, it stops down to f/5.6. The minimum aperture decreases as the lens zooms. The smallest aperture we noticed while shooting was f/10.5.
The lens mount telescopes in three sections, and the mechanics aren't particularly robust – they wobble. We noticed color fringing in high-contrast subjects at the edges of the frame. Fringing shows up as discoloration along the boundary between bright and dark regions. We also noticed distortion at the wide angle setting, in which straight lines bow out, away from the center of the frame.
|
