The EX-Z1000 is a responsive point-and-shoot camera that's ready to shoot almost immediately from power on. Its tiny size necessitates the use of a small number of tiny control buttons.

There’s a lack of direct access to functions such as macro and shooting modes. Instead, there are three individual menu systems with a button to enter for each.

The main menu system, while easy to read, can take a long time to navigate. If you want to make quick changes to settings while framing a shot, you’ll find this menu frustratingly slow.

The Display menu allows you to change the way the camera presents information. If you change the display mode from Normal to Panel, you’ll find an interactive status bar to the right of the display.

This provides quick and easy access to most of the common shooting options using the cursor controls. You can also select a live histogram display and adjust the brightness and colour reproduction.

We feel there are perhaps too many options. For example, power-saving options are an obvious benefit, but do you really need to change the display mode between Dynamic, Vivid and Real settings?

The Best Shot menu is an easy and fun way of setting up the camera for a variety of shots without any required knowledge of photography or camera functions.

Rather like choosing a meal from a foreign menu by pointing at the pictures, this system lets you select the kind of picture you want to take without having to understand the terminology. A flick of the zoom ring provides a concise description, together with brief tips on how to take the shot.

A VGA resolution (640 x 480) movie mode is included, but the option to select this is in neither the panel nor the main menu. Instead, you’ll find it as an option in the Best Shot menu.

Casio makes much of the fact that this camera has a 10megapixel CCD, although most digital SLR users are quite happy with 6-8megapixel sensors.

Our results from the Exilim Z1000 were very good for a camera of this size, although it’s debateable whether all 10 million pixels are making a useful contribution to the final result.

Purple fringing was apparent in some shots, but no more than we expected with a camera of this size and, although the overall picture is sharp, it does tail off slightly towards the edges.

The 10megapixel sensor also means that, In the highest quality mode, each shot is more than 4MB in size. You'll therefore need to spend a little on SD memory, which isn’t supplied with the camera.

The Exilim Z1000 is a good performer considering its small size and houses some interesting features, but its small controls might not suit those with large fingers.

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