Casio Exilim EX-H5 Digital Camera - Red ( 2.7 inch LCD,12.1MP, 10x Optical Zoom)

I read about this type of camera ("compact travel zoom") in a review at DPReview, and it struck a chord with me: a small camera with a lens that does wide-angle and decent zoom. I've been fed up with carting a DSLR around on holidays, but I like the wide-angle. So, I thought I'd punt a few quid and see how it worked out, figuring that £120 or so isn't bad for what promised to be a good bit of kit. I should add that I have had a couple of Casio EXILIM cameras, so I didn't have any fundamental concerns about the brand, quality, etc.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the camera is outstanding. The picture quality is excellent, nice vibrant colours, sharp focus, and amazing wide-angle photos or zoomed-in details. As with all EXILIM models, you get a terrific range of options to get the best pictures.

Its image stabilisation means it takes good pictures in fairly dim light. Indoors, in the evening, in a normally lit room, you get a nice clear photo, without flash. This gives you natural-looking photos, and how many cameras at this price can boast this? Also, the HDs videos are pretty good. You can walk and video at the same time and the picture doesn't shake at all. Sometimes the video stabilisation "jumps" if you are really shaking the camera around, but it's a not a problem mostly and in any case you can switch it off or alter the settings if you're going to be running around a field!

Best of all, in my opinion, is the battery life. I've taken nearly five hundred photos so far, and loads of videos, and I've charged the battery up once. It's supposed to do about 1000 photos between charges, which I reckon is perfectly achievable if you don't take videos. This means that you could take the camera on holiday fully-charged and leave the charger at home. What's amazing is that the battery itself is tiny!

The EXILIM cameras let you change a number of settings on a quick menu: you can change the picture size / aspect ratio (especially useful if you like the "shape" of conventional 35mm photos), flash modes, autofocus modes, autofocus points, shutter mode up to 10fps shooting, if you want, and that's before you get into the proper menus! From there you get to dig deeper into the cameras functions if you so wish.

Other reviewers mentioned the Best Shot features. To be honest, I rarely use them -- it does a good job in most situations in the default settings -- but the many Best Shot modes are good at taking difficult photos. For example, "Night time portrait" (which I've used once at the Vatican) will let you take a self-portrait photo of yourselves in front of a monument at night. It takes a really long-exposure photo of the background and then flashes briefly to light you up in the foreground. This is a difficult shot to achieve even with a top-notch DSLR, but the Casio does it with one setting. There are about 40 different Best Shot modes including Portrait, Self Portrait, Night Time Portrait, Scenery, Portrait with Scenery, Food, Children, Autumn Leaves, Flowing Water, Natural Green, Flowers, Pets, Party, etc.

Writing this just prompted me to look through the BS modes and some of them are incredible: for example, the Self-Portrait setting lets you click the shutter, then (at your leisure) point it at your face. When it sees your face in the frame, it takes the picture. Good stuff. The Self-Portrait (2 person) setting does the same... but it waits for you AND your buddy to get into the frame! Amazing! Perhaps I'll start to use them a bit more now.

Anyway, enough rambling. Buy this camera. You won't regret it.

UPDATE: 26 Feb 2011

Had the camera for a while now and taken hundreds of pictures with it. Still absolutely chuffed with it.

One point of note though -- if you want to take HD video, you MUST have a high-speed SD card. If you use an older, or slow, card then it won't be able to keep up with the amount of data that the camera is taking, and you will lose sound after 20-30 seconds. If you have a high speed card, the card can cope fine and this problem won't occur. I would recommend you test your card by shooting a video for more than minute or so. If you watch the screen it shows a little "REC" symbol in red. If this starts to flash, it means that the card can't keep up. In the manual, it recommends a card with a transfer speed of 10MB/second or above. I ruined all my first videos on holiday :-( then started to use these and all was well: Sandisk Ultra 15MB/s SDHC Card 8GB - Retail Pack

Bought this camera for my wife. She is a very keen amature photographer, but produces some lovely shots.

It really is a fantastic little camera. The 10x optical zoom lense is very clear and focuses easily on objects, even a tiny boat several hundred meters out to sea from the top of a cliff.

Although it has 12Mpixels you can get very nice quality pictures using the 5 Mp setting which is more than enough to view clearly on a 32" tv screen.

It has a physicaly tiny flash, but it is surprisingly powerful.

The best detail for us was the "best shot" feature. There is a setting for almost every situation. All you do is choose the setting, point the camera and take the picture. The camera dose the rest. It even puts make-up on the portraits, lol. (true)

For the price this is a wonderful camera and I would recomend it to anyone.

Just two observations which might help. Get a good quality camera case, just a small one, to protect it against knocks. And get a spare battery as the one that comes lasts easily a whole day of constant photograpy, but if you forget to recharge it, you will need a spare. They aren't very expensive, I got one for less than a fiver.

Edited 1st October:

A detail my wife found, which is annoying, is that there is an on/off button on the top, but the camera button on the back also turns the camera on and extendes the lens. She heard the lense motor straining when the camera was in her trouser pocket and had accidentaly turned on while she was sitting down. For such a fine camera it is a disappointing design fault.

This is a great little camera, it is extremely easy to use and has loads of extra features. The small instruction book that comes with it is very very basic,but I managed to purchase an instruction manual over the internet for a nominal charge which I have found invaluable, and was amazed at what can actually be achieved with this camera. Would have no hesitation in recommending this camera to others.