Casio’s Exilim series is a set of slim and stylish digital cameras that are taking over the whole range, in preference to the more ordinary QV-R series. Casio Exilim EX-Z40 is a 4MP digital camera with a 3x zoom and a set of features aimed mainly at amateurs and casual photographers. These include Casio’s proprietary Best Shot modes, which are like the scene modes in other cameras, with combinations of settings designed for specific types of subject. Casio goes further, though, presenting each Best Shot mode as a full-screen sample image accompanied by an explanation of what it does and when you should use it.

Casio Exilim EX-Z40 Best Shot modes

Casio Exilim EX-Z40 comes with 21 of these Best Shot modes, and they go beyond the ordinary to include a Coupling Shot mode, where you can get both you and your subject in the final image, and a Pre-Shot mode, where you can frame up a scene ready for another person to take a photo of you against your chosen background.

On top of these you get a good selection of other customary scene mode types, like portrait, landscape, night shot and so on. You can also save your own Best Shot modes, which is handy. To do this, set the camera up with the white balance, ISO, EV compensation settings and any others you want, take a shot, then choose that shot as the basis for your Best Shot configuration.

Other features of note include a larger-than-average LCD display. On cameras of this size, you’d normally expect a screen of just 1.5 or 1.6 inches, so a 2-inch display is really rather nice. On the other hand, its modest resolution of just 85,000 pixels does make it a bit ‘granular’ in appearance.

As well as being highly pocketable, Casio Exilim EX-Z40 has got some serious staying power, too. A new Super-Life battery offers up to 360 shots by the CIPA standard (LCD on).

Less good is the paltry 9.7MB internal memory, which is the only storage this camera is sold with. It does have an SD card slot, and you’ll need to invest in one straightaway, if you want to take more than a handful of shots at a time.

Start up and AF speed

Casio Exilim EX-Z40 is quick to start up (about a second), and two ‘Direct on’ buttons on the back make it more convenient still. One starts the camera in shooting mode; the other in playback mode. The seven-point AF system seems quick, and Casio’s ‘Auto Pan Focus’ feature is designed tospeed things up still further by not changing focus once it’s locked on. This is designed to eliminate shutter lag with moving subjects, but if the subject’s moving towards or away from the camera, this suggests focusing errors might result.

In good lighting, the Z40 appears to focus perfectly well, taking no more than half a second or so to ‘lock on’. In dimmer lighting, and with longer focal lengths, our tests produced some very soft looking images, despite the fact the camera had confirmed focus. The camera was tripod-mounted at the time, so the reason for this is unclear.

The control layout is very good. The only annoyance really is that you have to use the menus to switch between the standard auto-everything Snapshot mode and trie Best Shot mode. Once in Best Shot mode, although the different modes are extensive and nicely-presented, it’s inevitably going to take you a few moments to cycle through to the one you want – there are 21 of them, after all.

What is nice, though, is the way that you can configure the left/right navipad buttons to adjust EV compensation, white balance, ISO and the self-timer. The self-timer is interesting, while we’re on the subject, because not only does it offer a choice of delays – two seconds or ten seconds- but a unique triple-shot feature. This is more useful than you might imagine, because it enables you to select the best of the three shots for saving and discard the other two. After all, in any group shot, there’s always someone blinking, pulling a face or looking the wrong way…

The Z40 might not be terribly sophisticated, photographically, but it’s well thought out. You can opt to display a live histogram on the LCD, and if you configure the navipad buttons to adjust the EV compensation level, you can quickly apply exposure settings perfectly suited to the dynamic range and tonal characteristics of your subject.

All-round appeal

There are other features here to keep you entertained, though their lasting value is questionable. You can customise your start-up screen and camera sounds, and use your camera as an alarm clock, complete with custom ‘wake-up’ image.

More usefully, the playback mode can cycle through images at ten frames per second -useful for quickly finding one image among many, and there’s a ‘flip’ feature for showing an image to someone facing you. You can display saved images as a ‘calendar’, too – images are displayed as small thumbnails on a month-per-view display.

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