Summer is heating up and the press releases are coming in thick and fast - every day we get at least one new camera announced. This time it's the turn of the Casio EX-Z600 to bow out and be replaced by the EX-Z700. If you read my review of the EX-Z600 then you'll know that it's one of our current favourites - beautiful clear screen, pictures full of colour and detail and bags of scene modes in its sleek metal body.
The EX-Z700 promises to be all this and more. If you're up to speed with Casio's naming pattern, you'll realise that the “7” means a 7MP sensor 9or 7.2 to be exact). Whether this makes a huge difference to the image quality remains to be seen. Truth to tell the EX-Z600 already delivers more detail than lots of other 6MP cameras so whether you need the extra 1MP is up to you.
There are also a couple more scene modes that look interesting. “Auto framing” is apparently based on “auto follow” technology. It is designed to solve one of photography's most difficult challenges - kids don't sit still. A red outline surrounds the moving subject on the screen and follows it. When you fire the shutter the area inside the frame will be captured. Sounds great! The release doesn't make it clear whether this is captured at full resolution (i.e. all 7MP) or not.
“Layout shot” follows the fashion for putting limited editing functionality into the camera rather than relying on a computer. With this you can take two or three photos and merge them into a composite using predefined templates. Whether that will turn out to be useful in the real world remains to be seen but if those two don't keep you happy then there are another 35 scene modes to choose from.
The EX-Z700 will be available in two shades of grey (OK, “silver” and “gunmetal”) from August.
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