Casio Exilim EX-Z300

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

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 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.
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 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.