Ultraslim Casio Delivers Excellent Images
The 7.2-megapixel Exilim EX-S770 is light on manual controls, but it scores points for style and picture quality.
The new $320 Casio Exilim EX-S770 is a 7.2-megapixel addition to the company's Card series of ultra-slim cameras. The svelte, stylish body comes at a cost, though, as the camera lacks many of the manual controls you'll find on similar models.
The EX-S770's sturdy metal body is just 0.7 inch thick. At 2.8 inches diagonally, the LCD fills most of back panel, leaving little room for buttons. As a result, the buttons are small, which can make trying to access them very frustrating.
The EX-S770 doesn't provide such manual controls as aperture- and shutter-priority modes. You can, however, adjust sharpness, saturation, and contrast, as well as the intensity of the flash; also, you can customize the white balance and assign two positions on the four-way selector to change the ISO, for example.
This small camera produced photos with impressive image quality in our tests, earning an overall score of Very Good. In particular the EX-S770 excelled at taking shots with low distortion and sharp details.
It has an antishake feature, too. In informal testing, this feature was somewhat effective at sharpening an image shot in daylight shadows, but it couldn't freeze the blur caused by my subtly shaking hands on an indoor shot taken without a flash.
The EX-S770's light sensitivity is low--it tops out at ISO 400 (many point-and-shoots offer up to ISO 800 or ISO 1600), so you'll have trouble getting a sharp shot in low light without using the flash.
Battery life was a little below average. In our lab tests, the EX-S770 took 250 shots (versus the category average of 277 shots) on a single charge of its lithium ion battery.
Still, if you tend to stick with automatic mode and rarely adjust the settings on your camera, the EX-S770's high image quality and stylish design make it a fine option.
Eric Butterfield
