Casio Exilim EX-Z1050

Picture Quality / Size Options (7.0)
The Casio Exilim EX-Z1050 has a 1/1.75-inch square primary color CCD with 10.3 total megapixels on it. 10.1 of those are effective and available for use. In the panel and quality menus, users can change the image size from the following selection: 3648 x 2736, 3648 x 2432 (3:2), 3646 x 2048 (16:9), 2560 x 1920, 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, and 640 x 480. There are also compression options: Fine, Normal, and Economy. The massive 10-megapixel images can be resized in the playback mode to 5 megapixels, 3 megapixels, and VGA size. Resized files are saved separately, so the original isn’t lost. Users can also trim pictures in the playback mode by zooming in up to 8x and moving around with the multi-selector.

Picture Effects Mode (8.0)
The Z1050 has an abundance of picture effects, found in the quality subheading of the recording menu. Color filters include Off, Black & White, Sepia, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Pink, and Purple. There is a live preview when choosing the color mode, which is helpful. The options like Yellow and Purple aren’t as strongly colored as the Black & White and Sepia, for example. The individual colors appear like an error in color balance rather than a truly colored photo. The sharpness, saturation, and contrast can be adjusted on 5-step scales too.

There are some more picture effects in the playback mode. The brightness can be adjusted on a 5-step scale with a preview. There is a keystone effect that supposedly levels out uneven shots; it wouldn’t work on portraits, but makes attempts at straightening text shot on slanted paper. The final product usually ends up as a very oddly formatted crop of the original image surrounded by white blocks. It cut off the text in my images and really didn’t work that well. There is also a color correction feature in the playback mode, but it isn’t very practical. It insists on performing the keystone feature first, so it crops to an odd size. Then users are allowed to zoom and resize to a more common format, but that just shrinks the image size! Only after all this does the camera perform the color correction and save the image. This is annoying: your nicely colored image is hardly big enough to make a decent 4 x 6-inch print. Avoidance is the best solution here.