The Ex-Z110 is a well made camera that balances the expectations of the technophobe who wants point and shoot automation with the thinking snapper who wants control of aperture and shutter speed in some situations. The mode dial has conventional settings for aperture and shutter priority and for full manual setting but it doesn’t have the conventional P for program mode. Instead it has Snapshot and Easy modes. The instruction manual treats these settings as state secrets and gives no clue as to what they mean or how they differ in operation.

However the little Casio does provide for different metering setups from full screen average to centre spot.

The camera runs on two AA batteries which is uses frugally. However it might be as well to factor the cost of a couple of rechargeables and a batter charger into the price of the camera. Of course the advantage of using standard batteries is that you will never be far from a power supply.

Like this: The Casio Exilim EX-Z110 immediately endeared itself to us by having an optical viewfinder. It is a very small affair but it has reasonable image area coverage of about 80 per cent of what the sensor will capture.

Exposure was generally good. Focus was a little soft, needing a touch of sharpening in Photoshop. We turned a sequence of images taken with this camera into a slide show for display on a large television set and the results were excellent.

Dislike that: The Casio has one curious defect. At first we assumed that there was something wrong with the camera settings because we were getting consistently poor results, at least judging by what we could see in the 50mm LCD screen. On the LCD screen the pictures were washed out and dull. But when we transferred the images to the computer and opened them in Photoshop they were fine. It is possible that this fault is specific to our test camera.

Parting shot: With a 6 megapixel sensor and image stabilisation the Casio represents excellent value for money.

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