Casio Exilim EX-Z150 Review
This is not a camera to carry in your pocket. It looks cool and is meant to be seen. But does that justify the $179.99 price tag? Let’s see.
First of all this camera appears to be really elegant and although it is in the budget range of ultra compacts, it looks like it is far more expensive. It is an 8.1 megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom and a built in flash. The LCD is 3 inches in size and, as with all cameras of this type, there is no view finder. The display is bright enough to be seen under even bright lights. The camera accepts SD / SDHC / MMC / MMCPlus cards besides having 19.9 MB of internal memory.
Built for simple point a shoot use, the camera has four basic operational modes:
Auto
Best shot – there are 22 different presets available and while this may seem to be too many and may complicate photography needlessly on a point and shoot camera, it is easy to scroll through them. There is even a help function that guides the user as to which preset may be best for which conditions. Still, most point and shoot users will probably stick to Auto.
Movie – up to 640 x 480 / 30 fps at best movie resolution.
An automatic YouTube video capture mode for taking movies ready for uploading to the web.
The plastic body is slim and very elegant with a solid feel to it. It will fit easily in a pocket and is strong enough to bear the stress of being forgotten and sat upon! This happens far more often than you would think and the results are often disastrous.
All lenses have some distortion. In the case of the EX-Z150 it appears most noticeably in the wide angle setting. Having said this, it must be admitted that some amount of distortion is a problem with all point and shoot cameras.
Being a point and shoot camera, going into a detailed analysis of how it operates and why it produces the results it does, is pointless. What the user of this type of camera is interested in, is the end result – the picture he is able to take. The EX-Z150 is very average in this regard. Indoor photos with a flash tend to appear a bit faded – almost as if the flash is too strong for the camera. Outdoors in bright sunlight the picture quality is acceptable. But when there are contrasting light and shade conditions, the shaded areas often appear almost black. And action photography produces mediocre results – the camera is just not made for that.
In the final analysis, this is a very average camera. Its fine for indoor use and capturing posed family snapshots. But trying to capture action or wide angle views is where you will start to have issues of image quality. This is the budget range and one should not expect too much. But it seems that there are other cameras out there that offer better results and features for the same price.