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Review: I did soooo much research before buying my Casio Exilim Z4 digital camera, including buying Digital Computer Buyer magazine, but most useful of all was the reviews on Amazon, so I wanted to add mine. I was looking for a small camera with good picture quality, short video capacity and some manual functions, both to take pictures of my kids, and also to take photos of sufficient quality to put on the websites I build professionally. It was a toss up between the Fuji F700 and the Casio Exilim in the end, although I also was tempted by the Olympus Mju series. Anyway I decided on the Casio, and although I don't have much to compare it with apart from a Fuji Finepix S3000, I have not regretted my decision in any way. The camera looks beautiful, and really is tiny. It has a metal case and feels expensive! The screen on the back is the best I have seen and I hardly ever use the viewfinder. I was able to start taking pictures straightaway although I did also print out the pdf manual because the camera does have so many settings and I feel I am only scratching the surface with it. You can use the snapshot function or one of their pre-sets, and you can even save your own favourite settings. Night shots are really superb, much better than the Fuji camera I used. The camera is very light sensitive. The movie mode is all I need, and I even managed to capture a ballet performance on a stage quite a way away from me. My favourite mode is the macro without flash, and the pictures I have taken look professional. I would say don't bother to download the software to download your pictures onto the computer if you have any sort of picture editing software like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop - it isn't very good unless you want to make rudimentary webpages. The docking station simply shows itself on the computer as a removable disk. The last thing I would say is that I didn't want the delay when taking photos which you seem to get with a lot of digital cameras - well with this one there is no delay at all, unless you are taking pictures under very low light conditions. The battery lasts well. As the other reviewers have said though - do buy a 128Mb card to go with the camera. I bought a bytestor SD one from Amazon and it seems just fine. All in all I think this is a superb purchase. |