The 5 MP Casio Exilim Zoom Ex-Z55 combines the best features of the 3-star Z40 with a dramatic upgrade in image quality, making this one of our favorite ultracompacts. The Canon Powershot SD300 edges it out of the Editors' Choice spot, but just by a hair.

This solid, easily pocketable camera manages to fit a in a ton of features that we like, including Casio's usual great (if crowed, due to the many features) menus, a 2.5 inch LCD that's reasonably bright and sharp, if not the best among the ultracompacts we've seen, an exceptionally long lasting lithium ion battery (it's said to get about 10% better battery life than even the that of the Z40, which we applauded), a real-time histogram, and many, many scene modes, including some very cool ones like coupling, which lets you take a picture of the same scene twice with two different people in the shot and then combine the images (handy for taking a shot of yourself and a friend if there's no one else around to shoot for you). We also like the pan focus mode, which lets you take a reasonably well focused shot even when there isn't time to push the shutter button halfway down and wait for the autofocus. Fortunately you don't need this very often since shutter lag was reasonable even when we didn't pre-focus.

The camera has an f/2.6 to f/.4.8 5.8 mm to 17.4 mm (35mm to 105mm, 35 equivalent) 3x optical zoom lens that retracts into the body when not in use. Like the Panasonic DMC-FX7, the Z55's reasonable set of manual controls are somewhat crowded into the space remaining on the camera back given its large LCD. Unlike Panasonic, Casio has managed to make space for an optical viewfinder.

We found the camera reasonably fast; it boots up in a very respectable 2.1 seconds (only its stablemate, the Casio EX-S100 and the Canon PowerShot SD300 beat it in this roundup at 1.8 seconds each, though our former EC, the Sony Cybershot DSC-T1 still holds the ultracompact record, at 1.6 seconds). Its flash shot-to-flash shot time is also good for the ultracompact class, at 3.4 seconds. We don't, however, much like the fact that the LCD seems to be blacked out for a long chunk of this 3.4 seconds, which prevents you from framing the next shot. The Z55 scored quite well in our lab shots, getting a category-leading 1,475 average lines of resolution, and a very good 2.2% pixel transition score. The Z55's daylight test shots were pleasing overall, if not excellent, with good contrast and accurate hues, but we noted some falloff in the corners of the images and clipping in the highlights, as well some exaggerated edges probably caused by sharpening. The flash shot was a good solid image (if somewhat unevenly lit), but we'd like to see more highlights in the image and less fall-off around the edges.

The Z55 is a very good camera, and it scores better than any ultra-compact we've seen, in terms of numbers. The images themselves are another story; while they're good (and by far the best ultracompact images we've seen from Casio) they can't quite compare to those of the Canon Powershot SD300.

Benchmark Test
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