Customer Reviews

Exilim EX-Z80 8.1 MP Digital Camera - Green

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I owned several cameras, film and digital, and this is by far the best digital point-and-shoot I ever had. I have to admit that it took me a long time to decide on buying a Casio as opposed to Cannon, Nikon, or Pentax, as I had very good experience with those.
However my wife was supposed to be the main user of this new camera, so when she saw it in a store, she was sold on it, as the camera is very small and very good looking. She loved the green one (which is is actually a greenish yellow) so we paid $10 more than the black one and got it.
To me it took a lot more to be convinced, so here is my point of view on it:
Pros:
- Very good quality of the pictures (the auto focus works great and the multi point metering system takes care nicely of most situations, including some more difficult shots (like high contrast, back lit subjects, moving subjects, etc)
- I love that you can easily switch between standard format (1.33 ratio), film format (3:2 ratio), or wide screen (16:9 format).
- Metal body, makes the camera fill solid and you can have a good grip and stability.
- Easy to switch between different menus like changing formats, flash modes, ISO sensitivity, different self timer settings, shooting modes (like single, continuous, etc), auto shutter, and face recognition modes.
- Although I consider face recognition a gimmick and I never use it in real life, I did try it and surprisingly works very well! Not only the camera will find and focus on the face, but you can set also the Auto-Shutter to take the picture only when the subject smiles. There is even more: you can record several faces in the camera's internal memory, and when those people are in a larger group, the camera will find their faces and focus on them, so they come out the best! I tried the freakish feature and it works!!!
Also, it has other many Auto-Shooting features, that some people might want, I tried them, they work but, I don't normally need most of them.
- The movie recording quality is very good. I set it to wide screen and the highest quality and it is exceptionally good, I say at least like a DVD (also it does record sound very well, with no significant camera's own noise).
- It has its own movie recording button, so you do not need to go though any settings in order to start filming. You push the trigger on top, you take pictures, or if you push the trigger on the back side, you are filming (push again to stop). It can not get any simpler or faster.
- If you don't like to mingle with settings, you may find the "Best Shot" setting very simple and useful. You click the "BS" button (funny name... ;-), and you get a bunch of sample photos. Use the left-right-up-down buttons to navigate to the picture that is similar to what you are shooting, push OK, and the camera sets itself up for that type of picture (like flowers, portrait, self portrait, sports, night scenes etc, etc).
- I love the burst shooting mode (aka CS - Continuous Shooting), which has several settings:
CS - shoots pictures at the quality you set as fast as possible;
CS-FAST shoots lower resolution pictures and saves them to the internal memory. I got about 4 to 5 pictures per second in this mode, and the quality is good enough to print 5x7" pictures. This is a life saver when your kid shakes hands with the principal of the school, when they make a karate jump, or when they throw that ball. Normally you push the trigger and hope the camera takes the picture at the right time. With this, you push the trigger a little earlier, hold it until the kid is through, and before you know it you have a series of pictures taken at short intervals of each other, so your chances are a lot better to find one that shows what you want to see.
- Used with a 4GB SDHC memory card, my wife took literary hundreds of pictures and filmed many minutes of movie during a recent trip before she had to transfer them to the computer. She did that only several times during the 3 weeks trip.
- Also, one charge of the battery lasted for several days. In fact she did not charge it until, into the four or fifth day of the trip, the low battery message came on.
Negatives:
None so important to give anything lower than a five star rating.
- I would have liked a "shorter" focal length on the close end, so that you can have a wider view as sometimes there is not enough room to get away from larger groups of people. However most of the cameras have this focal lengths, so this is just a wish with small point and shoot cameras.
All being said, I love this little camera.

Okay, so this is the best camera EVER!!
Its really small, much more thna i thought, and its super thin. therefore, it weighs almost nothing.
The color is great, and there are very good features!!
I SUPER-HIGHLY RECCOMEND this camera!!!!
2 thjings, though:
dont get this is you ave large fingers, for the buttons are very msall
and make sure you buy a memory card-- it doesnt come with one!!

the shipping was extremley fast. i did the standard shipping and it arrived within 2 days.

HAVE FUN!!
xoo

I got this camera for a trip to Vegas. Absolutely loved it. Takes great pictures and I could carry it in my pocket. My husband has since claimed it for his own since it's so easy to use.

This camera has been great. It starts up quickly, and takes nice pictures and videos. I especially like the movie button. This camera is small and lightweight, and it's easy to use when you need it.

My only complaint is that the movie files are in "MOV" format which doesn't run on Windows Media Player. It's not too hard to get a player or converter to run them, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It would have been nice to have stuck with something more Windows compatible.

From my son - "I broke my Nikon camera at science camp and didn't have much money for a replacement so I searched the internet and consumer reports and found out this could be a great camera for me and most important I could afford it on my crappy allowance. It turned out to be the greatest camera I have ever had. I like that it has so many great features yet is so compact. It also takes high quality pictures and has a very nice movie mode."

This is a great camera. I bought one for my brother and he really liked it, and it took really good pictures. My camera got stolen so I ended up buying one of these in pink and it takes awesome pictures, the features are great and the zoom is awesome. It also makes really cool sounds. It is definetely a great camera.

Excellent "Best Shot" photo fx options (the button to get straight to the options says "BS"), I think there are around 30 of them. Portrait, Self-portrait (which is kind of weird, I just use portrait and shut off the flash), Black-and-White, Sepia, Landscape, Indoors, Night, Flowers, Book/Mag pages... Flash is easy to play around with, so is ISO which goes to 1600. You can be in picture mode and push the red Rec button and you're recording a movie; you can even zoom while in movie mode and take pictures, too. Two gripes for me are 1) In all my other cameras in playback mode, pushing the shutter would take you back to pic mode- I've had to get used to pushing the little red "camera" button to get to pic mode. Small, but a new habit. 2) the USB port cover won't stay shut all the way. It's not hanging open so I just deal with it, but I'm afraid of dust getting in. Maybe just a problem with the one I have? Also mine is more of a lime greenish than the pale green the picture seems to be, but all monitors are different . I love it, and it's so much easier to carry around at college than my DSLR, which I will be sad to leave at home but I'd feel really bad if anything happened to it!!

I had bought this camera a couple years ago i took it to st thomas this year and got it wet i figured i would try a canon seeing would they are so good well i hated it then i got and olympus camera and well hated it finally i bought another casio not the ex-z80 but i loved it it is fast doesnt take 2 mins just for you to take another picture but my daughter got it and hit it off a wall a couple times so i went a head and bought this camera. This camera doesnt cost that much but it is so much better the other brands and if you have kids and need a fast camera ready at any time this is perfect its fast and clear dont waste your money on any other camera like i did i learned my lesson after hundreds of dollars

I have purchased a number of small, point and shoot digital cameras since buying this Casio in October of 2008, but this one has turned out to be my favorite. For the small size, it has a large, easy to see screen. The battery lasts a long time between chargings. The videos it takes can be uploaded to YouTube in a reasonable amount of time, as opposed to videos of similar length I've taken with other cameras that I've had to give up trying to upload because it would have been an all-day event. The camera is well made; it still looks brand new after over 2 1/2 years of use.

So I bought this camera a while ago to replace my old one. I like how small it is, and it has all of the basic features that I needed.

My only real gripes about the camera are the following:
1. the battery charger sucks. At least the one that came with mine was falling apart, and would actually open up so I could see all the electronics inside. It's really hard to charge the battery and the battery pops out of the charger. You usually have to make a couple attempts to get it to actually stay in the charging slot.
2. the resolution of the pictures is pretty good, but if you want to really zoom in on your pictures, the lower resolution becomes more apparent.