Excellent camera - small, fast, long battery and quality pics

Author's Rating:

Pros: Size, Battery life, Picture Quality, audio/video recording and ease of use.

Cons: Rather expensive (but worth every penny)

The Bottom Line: 
It's small, fast, takes great pictures and has a long battery life. Buy it.

Author's Review
I bought a 4.0 Mega Pixel Casio EX-Z40 in early April '04, making it my first digital camera. I wanted a digital camera that was small, quick to start up, quick to take pictures, had a long battery life and, on top of all that, took great pictures. I was leaning towards the EX-Z4U but ultimately decided to wait for the new EX-Z40 because of the longer battery life and ability to record movies. I have absolutely no regrets in my purchase. Now on to the camera.

This thing is nice and tiny. Small enough to fit in my front jeans pocket without making a large bulge which could draw attention from the other large bulge in my pants (my cell phone, of course). The LCD on the back is 2x2 inches, bright and sharp. I have yet to run out of juice on a night out. My 256 MB SD card has been filled on several occassions on one charge. Filled with what you ask? Mostly pictures of people with red eyes. But after playing with the camera I found that using the "red eye reduction" helped with this... imagine that.

The ability to record movies is nice to have, these aren't the best quality movies, but it's nice to know that if I see a Guinness book record being broken I can get a quick clip of it. I mean how many times has that happened! It's so frustrating!

The camera is easy to use, but for a noob like me, it took some time to get familiar with the different options and best shot modes. But since I mainly just shoot people (and then take their picture), the portrait mode works fine. I've had no trouble taking pics in low light like in bars, outside at night or outside of my neighbor’s bedroom window at night.

I am very impressed with the speed of start-up and the speed at which I can snap of shots of unsuspecting victims, er, subjects. Everyone who has seen it wants to play with it, so I let them, and then I show them my Exilim.

The included Kodak software is useless, melt the CD it comes on in your microwave for kicks. The Photo loader software works well, although it lacks any ability to publish the photos to the web, which seems odd since that functionality could have been added with little to no effort.

All in all, I love my Exilim EX-Z40 and would recommend it to anyone looking for a small, quick, quality camera with great battery life and a lot of extras.