Casio Exilim EX-Z300 Digital Camera Review

Casio Exilim EX-Z300

Digital Camera Review

Nov 26, 2008 - By Tim Barribeau
2.1 The Exilim EX-Z300 is a slim and shiny 10-megapixel point-and-shoot camera from Casio, that has an impressive zoom ratio of 4x, and a maximum aperture of f/2.6, which should let you shoot at very high shutter speeds. However, once we got it into our labs, we found that it performed slowly, and while it did very well in some tests (like resolution and manual noise) it also really struggled with others (such as automatic noise and white balance). These uneven test results and slow speeds coupled with the annoying user interface made this a less than favorite. For full details on the $299.99 camera, follow the link below.
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Casio EX-Z300

Model Design / Appearance (5.00)
The Casio Exilim EX-Z300's appearance is utterly pedestrian; It looks like the vast majority of point-and-shoot cameras, which is neither bad nor particularly interesting. The front of the camera has the lens placed against the right wall, and the rear is an LCD with a strip of controls along the right. It's not a look we're particularly enamored with, but it functions well enough.

Size / Portability (8.00)
The camera is 3.8" wide by 2.3" high and 0.9" deep (96.9 mm x 57.6 mm x 23 mm), and weighs a feather-light 4.6 oz (131g). It's small enough that you can easily chuck it comfortably into even the tightest of pockets. It will equally happily take up minimal space in a bag or handbag.

Handling Ability (6.00)
Its petite size and weight make the Z300 easy as anything to handle. However, the small size has a downside. The buttons are small, cramped and poorly laid out. The plastic of the body is also quite slippery, and as it only has a tiny region to help with gripping (where your thumb rests on the camera back), you feel the need to hold it tighter than you probably really need to.


The camera is small and light enough to be wielded easily.

Control Button / Dial Positioning / Size (7.50)
The control scheme on the EX-Z300 is downright Lilliputian. It must be designed for those with the dainty, diminutive digits, as this humble reviewer's average-sized fingers repeatedly mis-pressed the controls, especially on the direction pad. What's worse is that there is so much unused space on the camera's back. The buttons could easily have been bumped up by a couple of millimeters without any real trouble, and saved us some cursing.

Additionally, the camera has no Mode dial, so to change to portrait mode, night mode, or anything similar requires pressing the BS (best scene) button, and navigating a menu. We also dislike having an entire button on the camera's top devoted to the ghoulish makeup mode, which evens out your subjects skin tone, and looks like they've been attacked with a trowel full of foundation. Finally, Casio also decided to use separate buttons for playback and shooting modes, and made those buttons the only way to switch between the two. With most cameras you can half-press the shutter to take you into shooting mode, but not so here. Not only that, but a single button could have been used to toggle between the modes, rather than devoting scarce real estate to individual buttons.


Button space could have been used better.

Menu (5.00)
We will give Casio points for, at the very least, having a menu system that's clear and easy to read. The writing is large and clear, and occasionally accompanied by explanatory icons to help you decipher what each setting does. There is the problem of each menu being multiple pages long, necessitating scrolling through long lists of choices before getting to where you need to be. At least there's a quick menu, accessed by hitting the Set button, which lets you change image size, flash, auto shutter, ISO, burst modes, facial detection, and one user-definable option. This little piece of customization can be set to metering, exposure compensation white balance, ISO, or self-timer. At the same time, your chosen option will also be bound to the left and right key, and pressing in either direction will scroll through the possible options for that setting.

The Quick Menu

There are four tabs in the menu system: REC, Quality, Set Up and PLAY (only available during playback).

REC Menu

REC consists of three pages of options covering shutter, focus, timer, digital zoom and other associated settings. These are the standard settings for most shooting, or so one would assume. Somehow many of these rather crucial functions are located in the Quality menu instead. There are a few choices one would expect to be tucked away in more obscure areas, like AF Assist Light, which could easily be located in a less commonly prominent spot rather than taking up valuable space on the primary menu.

Quality Menu

Quality actual contains a number of important controls, like white balance, metering and ISO. Once again, we would have liked to have seen these commonly altered choices as part of the main REC menu, to save having to change tabs frequently while shooting.

Set Up Menu

The Set Up menu contains the boring but essential bits of the camera's settings, like file numbering systems, world time, dates, auto power off, and so on. These will tend to be the settings you change once, and then leave alone after that.

PLAY menu

PLAY menu is where editing controls are tucked away, so when you feel the desperate need to crop your pictures, you know exactly where to look. There are a bevy of other editing controls, where you can adjust white balance, brightness, color correction, and many more which are covered in detail in the playback mode section that follows.


Ease of Use (2.00)
The menu system of the Z300 infuriated us due to one particular flaw. Every time you change an option, it completely removes you from the menu, and kicks you back out to shooting or playback mode. So if you need to change more than one option, you have to go back into the menu, scroll through two or three pages of settings, alter the settings, get kicked out, go back into the menu, change the next setting, and repeat the process ad nauseum. Couple this with the fact that the camera forgets all of your settings whenever it powers down. This mean that if you leave it too long, and it turns off to save battery power, you'll have to go through the whole revolting process again. While the menus are at least easy to read, there are too many pages in each division, and the whole process of changing multiple settings is aggravating. 

 


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