I wish Ciao would alert you on new review ratings and comments, I always try my best to return nonet...
I wish Ciao would alert you on new review ratings and comments, I always try my best to return nonetheless :)
Member since:13.06.2008
Reviews:11
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Looking round on the Jessops website for a new camera, I used their online 'camera selector' to find a camera best suited to me. The results did not come up with the z1080, but some very similar cameras such as the Nikon Coolpix S600 which I decided to look up on digital camera review websites to see if they were worth their price. One of these reviews lead me to looking at the Casio Exilim z1080, and since it fitted my £150 budget and appeared to be well worth the money I decided to look around for a good deal.
I bought this camera for £79 at Comet which was well within my budget, and I'm not surpised as why they advertise it on their front page. I was a little worried at first as the price was well below the average for any entry level
digital camera, but I was wrong for worrying. I purchased this camera because my old Kodak C875 was making a rattling sound and it's picture quality was deteriorating. Also the fact that the C875 has been discontinued would no doubt mean that repairing it would have been alot harder.
The first thing I did was read through the instruction manual.. I wasn't exactly impressed as it sounded like it had been written by people who could hardly speak english, and this combined with the american slang such as 'slacks' for trousers made it all very confusing, I live in the UK not the US! So maybe a hint for Casio would be to create regional instruction manuals instead of trying to pass off just the one across the world..
But anyway this was pretty humourous so it doesn't let this camera lose any points..
With the C875 I was too used to waiting a few seconds for the thing to load up and be ready for picture taking, I was surprised when I first turned on the z1080 as the lens extended very fast, this camera loads up and is ready instantly so I would recommend it to someone who takes pictures of things that come and go within seconds.
My only disappointment with the camera is that when focusing in, the screen freezes until it is finished focusing, my old C875 would focus and let the screen refresh just as fast as usual. Nonetheless, the focusing time for the z1080 isn't shabby, and the actual picture quality more than makes up for this small disappointment.
With my last camera I had to purchase rechargeable batteries and a charger for £20 seperately which did annoy me as the ones supplied weren't rechargeable and died more or less overnight. I was very pleased when I found Casio were thoughtful enough to supply a charger and very good battery with the z1080.
Usually I would have to load my pictures into Paint Shop Pro X2 with the Kodak C875 to touch them up and try to hide away all of the noise and bring up detail in the photos. I have only tried this once with the z1080 with a quick photo I taken pretty much carelessly. I couldn't improve the photo at all on Paint Shop one bit, the detail was nice and sharp, the contrast and colour brightness was perfect and I couldn't even find any noise to remove - all my attempts to tweak the photo made it worse so I'm pretty much convinced that Paint Shop isnt going to see much action with the z1080 in use.
For easy access and customisation, there is a small menu included on the right side of the 2.6" wide screen which enables you to quickly flick through with the direction keys and change options such as ISO, Focus type, Family face detection, Anti-shake and a few others, which makes changing options quite convenient.
Pressing the menu button will bring up a full screen menu (which has a low opacity so you can still see the image viewer behind it) which brings up the more advanced options such as White Balance, Image quality (economy, normal and fine) and Video quality (LP, normal, HQ wide, HQ, UHQ wide, UHQ) and many others. Here you can also fiddle around with saturation, sharpness, contrast, flash intenisity and even colour filter and others which are some pretty impressive features that could make after-photo editing a thing of the past for some. Also on the menu are some camera settings such as how long the the camera waits before going onto standby etc..
The monitor screen could do with slight improvement, it doesn't show amazing detail but it is still better than average and does not by any means bring down the photo quality.
Of all digital cameras I have ever used, the Casio z1080 beats them all hands down, and at a price of £79 you'd think you're dreaming of something. This camera has everything I could want on it basically. If you are looking for a camera that looks good, compact and easy to use, as well as taking amazing photos that you would expect from a camera that is worth £100 more, take a look at this camera before any other.
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