Sunday, May 07, 2006

Casio EX-Z750



On my forever quest for the perfect digital camera, I also look for particularly good deals. This was a very special deal.
I like to check out Fry's Electronics occasionally, to see if they have any thing interesting being cleared out.
They always have a lot of demo equipment for sale, but normally the prices are too high to be interesting. This day, I notices they have very low prices on all the Casio cameras on display. There was a couple of 5MP cameras, and a 6MP camera priced at $142. It sounded too good to be true. I checked them over, and they were pretty banged up. I was a little disappointed, and I decided not to buy one. I kept looking around, and remembered they have a class case where they put demos, that are normally overpriced, and no one buys. I looked through the case, and I spied another Casio, with no price, and I couldn't tell what model it was. I asked to look at it, and it turned out to be they EX-Z750. I asked for a price, and the sales man checked the computer, and came back with $179, for a 7MP camera. Be still my heart. Next I asked if there was any chance they would have the accessories. He said it was unlikely, but he would look. He went away for about 10 minutes, and came back with a bag that contained all the accessories, including an extra battery, but was missing the docking station. Now this camera has no standard connectors to connect it to either the computer or the charger, so It is pretty useless without the docking station. I had thoughts about how hard it might be to find or buy one, then he mentioned that several of the camera docking stations were still in the display, so we went up and sure enough the docking station was there, and he managed to disassemble it from the display, and even extracted the correct charger. So now it had everything, except the box it came in, which was not a problem for me. I told him I would take it.

As you can see from some of the pictures, the camera does have some physical damage to the lower left corner. It has apparently been dropped. I didn't notice any of this at the time, whic i guess is fortunate, because I probably wouldn't have bought it. As it turns out, it works fine. Now, i don't ever reccommend dropping a digital camera, especially a Casio. I don't have any personal experience with problems with Casio cameras, but I have heard they are somewhat fragile. I am hoping this one will last for a long time, because i am really getting to like it.

Lets see, 7.2MP, 3X optical zoon, starts up in under 1.5 seconds, auto focuses in about .2 seconds, has almost no delay after autofocusing to taking the picture, takes 640x480 resolution video at 30 frames per second at two bit rates, 30 minutes/GB, or 60 min/GB, using MP4 compression. Produces .AVI files that can be used on a Macintosh after loading a Quicktime plugin from Casio. The video and audio quality is very good. Oh, yes, and it take good pictures too. The pictures are big, which is not suprising for a 7MP camera, and there are multiple quality settings. i checked normal agains fine, and I could actually see some differences when zoomed in on the computer to a very small section of an image. So I have decided to use fine mode, which created photos of 4MB each. I guess the one really good thing about having a lot of mega-pixels is you can crop to your hearts content, and still get decent prints (I print 4"X6" prints exclusively). If you know me, you will know that I always tell my friends that are looking for a camera, that they don't need a lot of megapixels for small prints, and you really don't, anything over 2MP will allow you to do some cropping before printing and still get good prints. So I generally tell people that there are a lot of camera characteristics more important then the numbe of mega-pixels.

One of the things I had heard about Casio cameras was that they could take a lot of pictures on a battery charge. In fact most of the tests I have seen indicate that Casio batteries last almost twice as long as other brands of cameras. I am looking forward to finding out if this is really true, but so far it does seem to last more than a day of fairly heavy shooting.

Anyway, as you can tell, I am pretty stoked about the Casio EX-Z750, the reviews I have read say it is a great camera, and my personal experience has been great.

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