Casio Exilim EX-Z750

The Exilim EX-Z750's beautiful 2.5" LCD screen catches your eye immediately. The extra half an inch it has on most of the competition may not sound like much, but on a small camera such as this, a 2.5"LCD is massive, taking up most of the back. This makes framing shots considerably easier, and the LCD is mostly clear and free of ghosting, which makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant than hunching over a tiny, badly lit screen.

The EX-Z750 takes photos at 7.2 megapixels, with a maximum possible resolution of 3072 x 2304. The layout of the camera is intuitive, and with three quality settings, it easily caters for all kinds of output, from standard photos through to blown-up printouts. The shots themselves looked quite good. There was perhaps a small amount of over saturation of blue in some of our sky shots.

One standout function is the capture of high quality, 640 x 480 MPEG-4 movies at an impressive 30fps. However, trying to do this involved annoyingly long load and save times. This was unexpected, as the lag when powering up and taking stills was almost non-existent thanks to the camera's continuous shutter function. In general, the EX-Z750 was one of the fastest cameras we have used. With a shot interval of 0.9 seconds and a release lag of .007 seconds, the photo-taking experience is lightning-quick.

The Z750 offers quite a nice set of features, including manual exposure controls, as well as shutter and aperture priority modes. While falling short of full manual shooting, the range of features would satisfy most people.

It operates on a "super-life" lithium ion battery, which Casio claims can take 325 shots on a single charge.

The camera itself feels very solid and is reasonably small. About the size of a pack of cards, this model easily fits inside a pocket or a small bag.