Deciding between Panasonic and Casio was a tough one. Some Panasonic cameras come with leica lens, which made them very attractive, but at the same time, they seemed to be bulky.

I weighed my chances and went with the Casio and not at all disappointed.

Another test which you can do for your camera is to shoot the sky along with a building in the foreground, the colors of the building often get diffused into the sky making the sky white and not blue as it usually is. Casio scored very well on this - the sky was really blue !

+ve:
(1) Compact (not ultra compact)
(2) Runs on AA batteries
(3) Ultra bright large LCD Screen
(4) Optical view finder (Panasonic lacks this)
(5) Good combination of mechanical and digital controls
(I've seen cameras that have 100% menu driven controls which require you to go through cascading menus to do even the simplest tasks)
(6) And the best part: Excellent picture quality, compared it
with the quality of pictures in Sony Cybershot and Casio is far more superior. The colour contrast is excellent.
(7) Good sky color contrast (see my test above)
(8) Excellent focussing, I will soon upload some photos of my cat the focussing is very fast and very clear
(9) Image preview sorted by Date, looks like a calender - very useful

-ve:
(1) Not very happy with the battery life, but who cares, they are AA, I might buy some rechargaeble ones soon.

(2) Wish if the optical view finder was a little bigger

Overall, I am very happy with this camera, been with me for 1 week, will update my review if I find anything good or bad in this.

BTW, Target carries some excellent camera bags for as little as $7, no need to spend a fortune on them.

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Excellent Digital Camera - especially for the price, November 25, 2005
Reviewer: Michael Greenwood "film dude"

I recently purchased this beauty after many months of research. Essentially, this is comparable to the ex-500 in most aspects with the exception of storage capacity (pics and movie minutes.) The differences were not huge and, since I was going to purchase a 1gig SD card, the difference became minimal. Add to that the price difference and you can see why I went this route instead.

Once you open the box you can tell Casio has put quality into this item. It feels solid despite it's thin size. This is not the thinest camera out there but it is small, fits easily into my pocket and very durable. Casio provides an "overview" manual in booklet form and that gets you up and running. I am the type that reads everything before I use it and I found the electronic pdf manual very helpful. You can point and shoot out of the box, but you'll need the electronic manual to really understand how to manipulate the settings to your desire.

I took a dozen shots over the Thanksgiving holiday and easily downloaded them to my computer thanks to the included USB cable (no software needed for my MAC) Although it comes bundled with a photo storage, adjustment program, I use photoshop and probably won't bother with their program. It is straightforward and easy enough to use, but doesn't come close to photoshop. Anyway, the photos came out great. I used the 'fine quality' setting and I didn't need to touch up the photos at all. The quality was excellent (and I used their auto settings) and I could probably blow these up to 11x14's if I wanted.

There are nice features like anti-shake capabity and, if you ever have seen pictures from others with out-of-focus people, this feature should be nice to have. It has a quick shutter feature, allowing you to bypass the autofocus and instantly capture the shot in front of you. The start up time is incredibly fast and almost takes you by surprise. Best of all, there is no lag between snapping the picture and capturing the image. That can be a huge problem with other cameras and definitely something you should consider. This camera has other nice features like filters, auto-timers, etc.

To summarize, this is a nice, durable, feature-loaded camera with 7.2 mega pixels with excellent quality results. Amazon shipped it very quickly and did not disappoint. You should consider this one!
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Compact and takes great pictures under a variety of circumstances!, March 20, 2006
Reviewer: Johnetta Scott "gathering lego expertise"

Great compact camera. I purchased this camera for my trip to Disney World with a pre-schooler. I needed point and shoot technology that would not require a lot of fuss to operate. I loved the ability to keep this camera in my pocket for those "magical moments". It was easy to change camera settings for action shots, portraits, fireworks and candle light. I even liked the ability to shoot in black and white and antique modes. I left my video camera at home as well and used the camera's video instead. The antishake technology works pretty well but don't expect it to fix the shake of shooting on a roller coaster. I am pleased that my shots were a lot more spontaneous and I did not have to lug tons of equipment around the parks. In short, with a 1Gig card and a laptop to down load pictures every evening - I can't image traveling on vacation with my old cameras again. By the way I've compiled the pictures and videos into an awesome video/picture memory scrapbook, and I did not miss a shot.     Back to Casio Exilim EX-Z120