This 5 megapixel digital camera from Casio has a 2.2-inch LCD display and features 3x optical zoom. It can record MPEG4 movies up to 640 x 480 and has anti-shake, auto-macro and quick shutter to produce high quality pictures.

I hate to put superlatives in a review. It sounds like a would be working for the company trying to influence others.

But I am totally independent, don't work for this company or any photography or electronic related company, and really this is simply a *stunning* camera. My previous camera was a significantly more bulky Epson 2 megapixel PC800 which took excellent photos but had a huge problem: extremely low battery life. This is not the case with the exilim s500. The battery just seem to never stop: 1/2 day of riding bike taking pictures, video, reviewing them, trying everything I could on the camera and only 1/3 battery life taken! A battery takes less than 2 hrs to fully recharged when dead. You can buy a separate battery charger so that you can charge your spare battery while the battery in the camera also gets charged in the cradle at the same time.

This cradle really puts the exilim apart from the competing Sony DSC-t7. You simply put the camera in it and it recharges the battery and you can download through the usb-2 to your computer: no battery to remove, no card to remove, nothing to attach, simply leave your cradle always hooked to your computer and put your camera on the cradle. Pictures are stunning. So good is the precision that you can use your camera as a photocopying machine: you are in an hotel on a trip and want to copy a page from a phonebook? Take a picture of it! You can take a SINGLE photo of an ENTIRE FULL 8.5"x 11" page and read every single telephone number on it! That would already be great. But wait... you can read any single phone number of that entire page of phone book ON THE LCD ON THE BACK OF THE CAMERA by using the viewing magnifier and directions buttons on the back of the camera !!!! Absolutely STUNNING.

Videowise. Excellent. The automatic aperture control works like a charm and when I am well inside the living room I can see outside when looking through the windows and then when I move a little bit more I can see the inside very well, no adjustment to do at all. You wonder if CNN will just throw away all their equipment or if their reporters are already all using the exilim.

So in a nutshell:
- very very well thought of. Very easy to use. A real charm.
- excellent pictures even inside the house without a flash
- great video
- great accessories
- the only negative I could find is that you can take a macro only from a 17cm distance
- if I had to write a wish list for a digital camera , I could not have found anything they didn't already do, and then they did much more than I could possibly dream of. Hats off to Casio engineers. Fantastic work.



Link: Amazon