Casio Exilim Card EX-S600 6Mp camera

There are also a couple of neat movie tricks you can perform with the camera. One, Past Movie mode, allows you to start recording a movie just before the record button is pressed - that's right, before the button's pressed. Another, called Silent mode, bumps up the frame rate slightly and shoots in black and white to give any movies you make look like an old-time wrong-speed silent movie. And there are plenty of others to numerous to go into detail here.

The downside of all these automatic scene modes is the complete lack of manual control. What manual adjustments you do get, such as the exposure compensation, saturation, contrast or sharpness adjustment, all must be made by navigating the menus and require time to make them. One function can be assigned to the left/right jog buttons, however, allowing a modicum of usability to return to proceedings.

Nevertheless, this camera is not aimed at the enthusiast requiring control of every element of the camera - it's designed for the snappers among us, and as such, it fills that niche well. So what of the results?

Image quality is generally very good indeed. Focusing and metering are reliable enough, and the amount of detail the lens can capture is more than adequate for the tasks presented. However, there are couple of niggles. The most problematic is the very soft periphery to images: edge sharpness is quite poor, particularly the bottom left on the camera used for this test. The other niggle is the distracting lens flare I got in shots where I wouldn't have expected it. The EX-S600 has reduced contrast and thrown unwanted colour flaring across many of my shots even where the sun, though in front of the camera, is still well out of the frame.

Finally, there's a mere 8.3MB of on-board memory - sufficient for just six 'economy' mode shots; or two in 'fine' mode - though you can increase it by adding MMC or SD cards.

Verdict

The Casio Exilim Card EX-S600 provides a very satisfying feeling if photo-gadgetry is your thing. It comes in three colours - silver, orange and blue - to satisfy the fashionistas among you. And while snaps printed at 6 x 4in won't really show some of the image issues mentioned above, anyone wanting to make larger prints, particularly A3 or above, might not like the results.

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