Casio Exilim EX-Z750

The 7.2-megapixel Exilim EX-Z750 has all the strengths we're used to seeing from Casio cameras, like an effective menu structure and innovative video features. Overall, it's an easy-to-use ultracompact, but testing revealed a few picture-quality problems.

The camera's zoom covers 7.9 mm to 23.7 mm (a 35-mm equivalent of 38 mm to 114 mm), with an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/5.1. But what you'll notice first is the EX-Z750's very large 2.5-inch LCD, with adjustable brightness settings. We could see the image on the LCD even in bright light, but we appreciate that the camera also has a tiny viewfinder, a feature many manufacturers seem eager to remove from their ultracompacts. We feel it's still a useful thing to have. We were glad to see that the USB cradle, which you'll need to connect the camera to your PC, is fairly sturdy.

We also like the nicely displayed menus, always a strong point for Casio. The camera even has shortcut keys for quick access to important features such as resolution and ISO settings. The handy Best Shot mode comes with 30 different auto settings, some artsy, such as pastel and illustration, and some practical, like a setting for copying business cards. All worked reasonably well.

Yet despite the variety of scene modes, the camera could have done better on our still-life camera tests. The daylight shot was somewhat underexposed, and the strobe blew out some of the details in the flash shot. We found some noise and fringing in both the daylight and the flash shots, though the color saturation and color accuracy were adequate. The camera received an acceptable score of 1,575 average lines of resolution, and it booted up in a zippy 2.3 seconds. The recycle time was respectable at 2.9 seconds. We didn't find much shutter lag, nor did we see very much distortion in the zoom range of the lens.

The camera allows you to take MPEG-4 movies at 30 frames per second (at 640 by 480 pixels), which gave us clear videos with pretty good sound. The EX-Z750 also includes a past-movie function similar to the one found on the Casio Exilim EX-P505 hybrid camera. The feature is kind of a "time-shifting" function for cameras: Once the mode is activated, the camera records everything it sees without permanently saving the video. Press the shoot button and it saves the previous 4 seconds of footage along with the next 4 seconds, perfect for capturing your child's home run. We didn't see any unusual battery drain when the feature was activated, and by using a buffer for the temporary footage, it avoids devouring your storage space.

Despite some minor issues with image quality, the Casio Exilim EX-Z750 is a good choice for a multipurpose ultracompact. For cameras around the same price, though, we still prefer the comparison chart and benchmark test results.