Casio is perhaps one of the first names you'd think of when looking for a compact digicam; its Exilim range has in the past achieved rave reviews for an effective combination of quality and usability.
The superbly compact EX-S770 has clear intentions of continuing this trend. It's one of the most stylish and slim models we've seen and, with a 7-megapixel CCD, it offers enough detail for most people. The sleek silver/grey exterior houses a wide range of control buttons, the sheer number of which appears a little daunting at first, but after spending a few minutes with the camera you discover that most are pretty well conceived.
Despite housing a wide range of features for tweaking and adjusting settings to build the right shot, Casio has done a good job of making the most important of these pretty accessible. A range of display modes on the LCD gives you a choice of a clean picture, histogram display or a vertical mini-menu. This offers quick access to flash and shooting modes, ISO sensitivity and auto white balance adjustment.
When you get used to the layout and operation of the controls it only takes a few presses to make adjustments for your environment that other cameras often bury amongst a flurry of sub-menus. It's very usable, then, and it looks great, so how about the photos?
First it's worth mentioning that the LCD display, while very large and very colourful, is more adept at previewing your photos than replacing the viewfinder. A fairly poor refresh rate makes it a little difficult to see how changes to settings like white balance and exposure are actually affecting the shot. This is particularly apparent when using the 3x optical (plus 4x digital) zoom, when the image starts to look a little grainy and you start to see artefacts and ghosting on screen.
The resultant photos are good for the most part. If you take the time to fine-tune settings for the lighting and environment you're in, you can improve things quite a bit, but the automatic setting has a decent pop at this for you. Macro shots were particularly impressive; very sharp with vibrant colours and fantastic detail.
Regular landscape and portrait shots require a little more care, as bright colours can appear slightly washed out and for ultra-sharp images you'll ideally need a tripod or have the camera resting on something solid. Night shots were reasonably good: ISO sensitivity reaches 800 which was fine for close-up shots but you'll start to lose detail if you're snapping distant objects in poor lighting.
This is more of a point-and-shoot solution then, like many modern compacts. There are plenty of settings to fine tune if you know your photography and in doing so you can achieve better results.
A few niggling issues, such as the fact that you're only provided with an electronic manual and you can't plug the camera into a PC without the docking stand, could have been avoided, but overall we were impressed by the usability, portability and quality of Casio's latest Exilim.
