Viewfinder
The Casio EX-Z600 does not come with an optical viewfinder, a feature becoming increasingly rare in the point-and-shoot market, which has been in favor of ever enlarging LCD screens. While small optical viewfinders do have a tendency to produce inaccurate frames, their use does conserve battery power.

LCD Screen
The LCD screen for the Casio EX-Z600 is located on the back of the camera and consumes most of the back face with its presence. In the point-and-shoot market the focus has been on larger LCD screens in favor of optical viewfinders, and with larger screens come higher resolution levels, or at least that’s the case with some manufacturers like Kodak and Pentax who are providing 230,000 pixels with 2.5-inch LCD screens. However, the Casio EX-Z600 has an even larger 2.7-inch LCD with a resolution of just 153,600 pixels. Casio has been hyping this screen as a SuperBright LCD with three times the brightness of its predecessor, the Z500. While it’s great to have an LCD with such a high level of brightness to help in low light situations, it would be even better if Casio had upped the resolution levels to at least equal those of the competition.

Flash
The in-camera flash for the Casio EX-Z600 is located above and to the left of the camera lens when facing the front of the Z600. The Z600 has a continuous flash shutter with user control over the following settings: auto flash, on, off, red eye reduction and soft flash. Flash settings may be rotated between by pressing the down arrow on the four-way controller and scanning the flash symbols which appear in the upper left corner of the LCD screen. When the camera is set to wide angle, the flash range is 7.6 to 17.3 ft, while in telephoto mode the flash range drops to 4.3 to 8.7 ft.

The off-axis positioning of the flash, in relation to the zoom lens will result in coverage that is uneven and will likely cast hard shadows to the side of the subject. It is ideal to place the flash above the lens, so shadows fall behind the subject and are not visible in the recorded image.

Zoom Lens
The zoom lens for the Casio EX-Z600 has an extending lens barrel that retracts when the camera is not in use. This extending lens barrel should protect the lens from accidentally being covered by the user, a common scenario with point-and-shoot cameras where the lens is recessed into the camera body. The variable focal length lens on the Casio EX-Z600 contains 3x of optical zoom with a focal length of 6.2 to 18.6 mm. The maximum aperture range for the EX-Z600 is f/2.7 in wide angle to f/5.2 in telephoto. The zoom lens is constructed with 6 lenses in 5 groups, with aspherical elements. It is controlled via a zoom ring that surrounds the shutter button. This zoom ring reacted cleanly and accurately when shooting and displayed a comfortable ability to start and stop without a noticeable lag. Only digital zoom can be altered in movie mode.

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