The Casio S880 is an 8 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom. It has a 2.8 inch TFT color screen, built in Anti Shake Technology, 39 Best Shot scene modes, ability to add 30 second audio memos to photos, record movies in H.264 videos up to 848x480 resolution, 9 points of autofocus, 64-1600 ISO, Face Detection technology and much more.

The EX-S880 is available in red and black. It comes with a rechargeable lithium ion battery, a usb cradle, a mini usb cord, an AV cable, an AC adaptor, strap and CD-ROM.

The top of the camera has the on/off power button, shutter release, a DATA button, DISPlay, Record and Playback mode buttons. The back of the camera   has a dedicated movie record button, the zoom and lens controls, the menu button, a four way controller and a BS for the BestShot scene modes.

The camera is very compact and durable. It is about 3.72” x 2.38” x .68” in size. The body has a nice solid metal feel.

Features

The lens is a 3x zoom lens with a 38-114 mm equivalent optical zoom. It has a maximum aperture of F2.7-F8.0 and up to 4x digital zoom. The lens itself fits entirely into the camera and takes less the a second to extend when powering on.

The flash itself has an auto, fill, red-eye reduction, soft flash and off mode. They have also added a new data button on the top of the camera to open up text documents on the memory

The dock is how you have to charge the camera and to utilize the video output capabilities of the camera. The dock is the only way to access any photos stored on the internal memory. The dock has a usb button that lets you access the images on the camera via usb dock and a photo button which turns the camera LCD into a digital picture frame slideshow.

The display during recording mode has a side panel which lets you quickly change between megapixels, flash settings, timer settings, face recognition mode, ISO, EV settings and the time. This is very handy for those who like to quickly change settings to their preferences. It c an be disabled as well for those who don’t like all the confusion options.

Like all Casio cameras there is the BestShot mode that has many scene modes. The BestShot modes include the following:

Portrait, Scenery, Portrait with Scenery, Children, Sports, Candlelight Portrait, Party, Pet, Flower, Natural Green, Autumn Leaves, Soft Flowing Water, Splashing Water, Sundown, Night Scene, Night Scene Portrait, Fireworks, Food, Text, Collection, For eBay, Backlight, Anti Shake, High Sensitivity, Monochrome, Retro (sepia), Twilight, Layout, Layout2, Auto Framing, Old Photo, Business Card and Documents, White Board, Silent, Short Movie, Past Movie, For YouTube, Voice Recording, and Register (custom build your own BS mode)

Some of the more commonly used ones are High Sensitivity that lets you shoot at 1600 ISO for low light situations, Business Card and Documents or White Board will automatically correct for angles and crop the photo.

Use

The camera is rated to shoot about 220 shots. I usually can go throughout an entire with this camera without any problems however I always go out with a spare battery in case I don’t have access to the dock to charge the camera each night.

Overall the camera is very fast. The Face Detection mode is very fast at finding faces usually and takes about less then a second. Powering the camera on and using it can happen in about 2 seconds. Only because the Casio cameras have a dedicated video record movies I’ve ended up capturing a lot more home movies then I ever thought. Especially with the built-in YouTube feature it’s very easy to quickly upload the videos online for sharing.

I personally shoot in the 2MP mode and the camera has a special line where you can utilize the digital zoom without any quality loss. Digital zoom is just cropping the photo however which this higher megapixel camera it crops from a higher quality picture so you end up with a quality shot still even with the extra digital zoom.

Overall

Casio offers a great compact camera in a very small package. This is the camera for you if you want to be able to keep this camera in your pocket without being a bother. I absolutely love the dedicated video button. Everyone I know has a lot of trouble changing to video mode before shooting a video. After you figure out the red dot in the corner is for recording video it’s hard to not use it for shooting spontaneous video. The camera has a 200 dollar street price and is defiantly the camera of choice for those looking for the ultra compact.

For more information on the S880 visit here.

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