A review of the Casio EX-S600 camera

It’s rare that I buy something that I immediately want to return, but that happened last week after I bought the Casio EX-S600 Exilim Card Camera.

As you may recall, my beloved Panasonic FX-9 camera disappeared along with my cellphone while I was at the beach in Maui.

Immediately afterwards, I went to Costco to buy a camera for the wedding and the rest of the trip. The S600 caught my eye because of its amazingly slim size.

Well, as with everything else in this world there are tradeoffs. One immediate tradeoff was that due to the tiny size, there was no plug for charging it. To charge the battery, you had to connect the charger to the docking station and then stick the camera into it. Yipes! That’s not very travel friendly!

With regards to the picture quality, it was mixed due to auto-focus. Some pictures came out spectacularly well, some came out very poorly. I found the auto-focus to be pretty darn slow. I’m sure it would’ve been better with Anti-Shake turned off - but that’s not a compromise I wanted to make. I also found recording movies to be a confusing process.

But the deal breaker was the fact that it kept crashing during the wedding ceremony. Yep. It crashed. Periodically the screen would blank out and an error telling me to power-cycle the device would appear. I think it was due to the incredibly intense sun - the camera was pretty hot to the touch.

Fortunately, Costco took the camera back without a hitch. (Thanks for taking one for the team, Costco!)

Now… back to saving up for the successor to my FX-9, the Panasonic FX-01 - why 01 comes after 9, I have no clue.