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:: Casio EX-Z850 Digital Camera - First Impressions ::

In anticipation of a family trip to Yellowstone next year, I wanted to upgrade my camera. I bought my Olympus C2040-Z in late 2001, and while it’s good, I’ve been finding myself without it a lot — it’s too big to carry all the time. I wanted a camera that would always be with me (pocket-sized), that had manual focus (for those tough to shoot subjects, like spider webs), had an optical viewfinder (so the LCD isn’t mandatory), and was a fast and friendly operator. There were a bunch of other things I was interested in, but those were the big ones.

No camera made right now fits the bill perfectly. Canon, one of the runners-up, makes some fine cameras that are small and have good image quality (I was interested in the Powershot A540), but they don’t have manual focus. I ended up deciding that the right camera for me was the Casio EX-Z850. It has everything I wanted in a small package. There are many, many reviews of it out there of varying opinions. My favorite opinion comes from Ken Rockwell, who basically says your camera doesn’t matter, just to get one and go take pictures. It’s a little glib, but I think it’s true.

Digital cameras are computers that take pictures, and as computers do, they improve over time. My trusted is five years old now, which is ancient in computer years. It is a 2-megapixel camera, which is fine for many things, but gives you little leeway for cropping. It has a movie mode, but the movies are 320x240 (small), do not include sound, and cannot be longer than 15 seconds; all in all, not very useful. Casio cameras are known to take very good quality video as well as still pictures, so that was influential in my decision.

I haven’t had the camera very long, and I haven’t been on any long shooting walks yet (it’s winter and not conducive to being outside leisurely). However, as a person with background in user interface design, I am keen to talk about the experience of using the camera. This is ground that Ken Rockwell covers to a degree in his expansive review of the 850’s predecessor, the Z750, a very popular camera (see also Mike Davidson’s post on it) that’s a lot harder to find right now than the Z850. Any review will tell you about the great features this camera offers. I’ll just highlight some specifics that have stuck out to me so far.

The Good

• This camera is fast. Probably any digital camera I pick up now would be faster than my old one, but I’m very impressed. After I turn the camera on, there’s barely enough time to look at the screen, let alone compose a shot — it’s ready to go right away. Playback is also very fast; I can hold the arrow down and zip through the images much faster than I need.

• There are two buttons on the back that give direct control over many settings like ISO, white balance, and more. These are settings you use all the time if you know what you’re doing, or if you’re trying to figure it out like me. Not having to dive through a bunch of menus to get these is great. You can also configure the left/right buttons to control an additional setting. I have them set to exposure compensation, so with these buttons I have direct control over pretty much everything that’s important to making pictures turn out well, no menus required.

• Even through you don’t have to use menus all the time, when you do, it’s quite pleasant. There are three main tabs (Rec, Quality, Setup), and you navigate them with the arrows and Menu button. The menus are fast to navigate, and sensibly laid out. No matter where you are in the menus, the Menu button always jumps you to the top, saving some up and down button presses. Casio has a reputation for cramming in the features, but for all the complexity, getting through the menus is pretty painless.

• In the middle of the arrow buttons is the Set button, which is generally used to execute various settings — it’s labeled OK on some cameras. On the Z850, it has the additional function of switching between photographic parameters when you’re in one of the manual modes. This was confusing to me at first, because the settings (shutter speed, aperature, focal length, and exposure compensation) are laid out vertically on-screen, and I expected the up and down arrow buttons to switch among them. Instead, Casio made the Set button do this switch, which is weird, except that it means that the Up and Down buttons stay consistent; in record mode, they always change flash and focus settings. It’s a tradeoff that means you’ll be pecking at the buttons for a while unless you read the manual, but I think the tradeoff was a sensible one in the interest of keeping the important settings of flash and focus consistent.

• There’s a viewfinder, though it is tiny, and not too accurate (still good for mashing the camera against my face to keep it a little steadier). I’m finding I use it a lot less than on my Olympus, which I used with the screen off most of the time to make the batteries last longer. However, on the Olympus, you couldn’t adjust most settings on the camera without first turning the screen on, and then you’d have to shut it off when you were done. The Casio will automagically turn the screen on when you press any of the keys on the back, and then turn it off again after a short delay when you’re done. This is excellent.

• During playback, you can browse in three modes: 1 at a time, 9 at a time, or monthly calendar. This was the first time I’d seen a calendar for photo browsing (sometimes you can browse 16 at a time as well as 9). I haven’t used this calendar a great deal for browsing photos, but it seems potentially practical in the deals of 2 GB and larger cards that can store hundreds of photos potentially shot over many days. Regardless, it’s handy to have a calendar on there.

• The Z850 features in-camera editing of various things: rotation (which is lossless, no resaving the JPEGs and losing quality), white balance, keystone, color correction, and more. I’d be inclined to avoid keystone and white balance editing in camera normally, because I wouldn’t want to mess up my originals. Fortunately, edits that change image content preserve the originals; the camera makes a copy and edits that instead. This is great, encouraging experimentation. Some of the edits like keystone and color correction create two megapixel copies, most create a full-resolution copy. There are also movie editing features that I have yet to use, but I think they are destructive edits, affecting the originals.

• This camera makes just about everything easy, even firmware upgrades. You just copy the file onto the memory card and turn the camera on while holding the menu button. It’s easy enough to do when one needs to, but not so easy as to be done accidentally. The firmware on this camera is a contentious issue, so it’s nice to be able to change it easily. I don’t think the most recent firmware makes my pictures blurry, although it is annoying that it forces the camera to zoom a bit in HQ video mode.

• You can use the camera as a standalone audio recorder. The audio quality is not great, but as a musician, I love the idea of having a recorder with me all the time. The lens doesn’t telescope in audio mode, so you can be stealthy, and because no image is recorded, you can record for a long time on a big card.

• Casio doesn’t include a memory card with the camera. Instead the camera comes with 8 MB of internal memory, good for 1 picture at full resolution. This seems silly at first, but once you get a real memory card, the internal memory is freed up for goodies. For one, you can store hundreds of custom scene modes (called Best Shots by Casio) that preconfigures the camera for certain kinds of shooting. These can be of your or others’ devising — and at about 5 KB each, you can get a bunch on there. For another, Casio has Past Movie mode, which buffers 8 seconds of video in the internal memory, so if you forget to start recording manually at first, you still get those precious seconds you might have otherwise missed. I don’t know if I’ll ever use this, but it’s a slick idea. All in all, I think this strategy is vastly superior to including a 32 MB card that most people will just replace anyway.

The Bad

• If you turn the display off manually, that overrides the post-shot review setting. In other words, if you turn the screen off, it will not turn on to show you what you just shot, regardless of your Review setting in the menus. My Olympus gets this right, turning the screen on after each shot if you have review turned on.

• In Playback mode, various functions in the Play menu are only available for photos, others only for movies. There is no indication in the menu which is which, so if you’re exploring (or if you just don’t remember), you’ll get an error if you choose one that doesn’t apply to the file type you’re looking at. It would be better for the menu to change dynamically, removing or disabling the items that can’t be used on the file you’re viewing.

• There are two separate buttons to switch between the main camera modes: Record and Playback, or Shoot and Look if you prefer. Out of the box, these buttons will turn the camera on, as will the recessed power button on top. For a pocket camera, this doesn’t seem like a good idea, since the lens telescopes out when you turn it on, and could get messed up in my pocket if it turns on at the wrong time. I changed the option so these buttons won’t turn the camera on. The unfortunate consequence of this is that I can’t turn the camera on directly into playback mode the way I could on my Olympus. It’s all or nothing at all — both buttons can turn it on, or both can’t. I wish just the playback button could turn the camera on; the only thing in danger would be battery life, which is extensive on this camera. If you want to save your lens motor, the workaround is to switch the dial to Audio recording mode before turning the camera on. The lens stays in, and you can then switch to Playback mode. It’s awkward, but saves the lens telescoping unnecessarily.

• In Playback mode, you press Set to play a movie; this is noted clearly on the screen. What isn’t noted is how to stop the movie; Set does nothing once playback has begun. I would expect it to start and stop the movie, but it doesn’t. To stop a movie, press Menu. The camera shows this to you if you have “Show me every setting ever” mode on, which shows you most pieces of data about a photo or movie you’ve shot onscreen, obscuring most of the photo itself. As a result, I keep that mode off most of the time, and therefore missed how to stop a movie. The manual notes this, of course, but I think Set might have been a better choice; it’s weird that it does nothing once playback starts.

• The camera comes with a dock, which is the only way, out of the box, to charge the camera and get the photos onto your computer. I find this a bit annoying, wishing instead that there were USB and power ports directly on the camera. Considering the small size, I guess they had to offload these to the dock. The most annoying part is that the dock doesn’t work unless it’s plugged into the wall — a USB cable alone is not sufficient to transfer photos from the dock. (Updated 12/19/06) The dock does work without being plugged in, which is good to know; of course, you still need the power cable to charge it, but for a quick trip somewhere, if you don’t have a card reader, you can leave the power cord at home.

These complaints are not dealbreakers, but they are problems in an otherwise very usable camera. I’ve sent several suggestions to Casio directly. We’ll see if they get back to me about them.

Other Notes

Casio digital cameras are well known for having lots of features, and for having good movie recording capabilities (firmware debates aside). To play movies on a Mac, you either need to download and install Quicktime components (from Casio or another developer, both work great), or get a media player like VLC that can play pretty much everything.

The Quicktime component will allow you to edit your movies in Quicktime Pro, iMovie, or other Quicktime-based video editing applications. However, I ran into trouble with Quicktime mis-identifying the type of video contained in the MPEG4 files the camera generates. Since I can’t tell Quicktime to use a different codec for a particular movie, I had to disable my DivX and 3ivx Quicktime components. With these components installed, the movies played back just fine, but when I tried to edit the movies, all hell broke loose (the entire movie going gray, mostly). Since I was just using those codecs to play various media in Quicktime Player as a curiosity, it was no loss to disable them and use VLC for playback purposes. Now I can edit the videos in Quicktime Pro with no hassle.

The Z850 is an 8-megapixel camera, but it can be set to shoot at 6, 4, 2, and 1 megapixel. I’ve read that squeezing more pixels into a sensor of the same size increases noise in the image (the Z750 uses the same sensor, but only pulls 7 megapixels from it, so its noise levels are supposed to be a little better), so I’ve wondered if shooting in one of the lower resolutions could be better for noise. I suspect I’m thinking about this in the wrong way because I don’t know the technology very well.

Conclusion

I think the EX-Z850 is a fine camera, a lot of fun and very practical to use. I still find myself wanting an SLR for really serious shooting, but this is plenty of camera with plenty of pixels to help me get images in everyday life. I have it with me all the time, it’s fast and friendly, takes nice videos and stills, and has all the control I want. I’d love it if Casio were to address my usability concerns; this camera is very good already, and with some tweaks, I think it would be nearly perfect in terms of usability. As it is today, it’s a very nice camera for not a lot of money.

There are tons of reviews of this camera on the web, with sample galleries. I’ve been enjoying browsing people’s photos on Flickr (in the camera finder, and in the EX-Z850 group) and in the Casio Talk forum on dpreview. The Flickr camera browser is a generally interesting resource for camera geeks.

For the record, I’m grateful to my parents-in-law who not only are organizing our trip to Yellowstone that sent me down the camera rabbit hole, but also bought this camera for us (okay, fine, mostly me) for Christmas, and gave it to me a little early so I could start taking pictures with it right away and have it for holiday travels and fun.