Casio’s Exilim S770 Card Digital Camera :

For years I’ve been honing my skills as an artist, a digital philanthropist of the photography world! True, that photography world very rarely leaves Flickr or MySpace — but as Nietsche one said; “What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” (Also, a good videogame. Heh.). Now that I’ve given you that bit of culture, that little bite of beauty, let’s talk about the Casio Exilim S770 Card Digital Camera.

Now, you can see the pictures and if you click here, you can see a nice shot of what Casio is marketing as the end-all, be-all to digital cameras. With this said, I was quite exuberant to open the box and peek on the inside. For one, the box is pretty small and I was expecting “slim” to just be something cute they use to get supermodels and wannabes to buy it. Generally, you’re never actually enthused when you hold up the “small” camera and it weighs as much as a bag of potatoes. Trepidation put aside, I opened the box and retrieved a small, beautiful red camera. When I say small, I mean it too - it is maybe a bit bigger than a pack of cancer-inducing, white smoking things. My general consensus? It’s small.

Now, the lens is packed into the camera like those stackable egg people that your grandparents keep buying you for Christmas. When you turn on your camera, they rise up from it like a pyramid of photographic wonder — and when you shut it off, they neatly disappear flush into the tiny camera as if it never happened in the first place. You would think that with a lens this odd, that the photo quality might be less than interesting. Usually lenses need to be bigger and more cleverly eschewed from the front of the camera — but not this time! Casio’s lens on the Exilim S770 is actually amazing, having photo qualities that would make your mother blush (If she knew what you were taking HD Pics of.). With 3x optical, a bright 1100cd/m2 2.8-inch display, VGA MPEG-4 recording feature in 16:9, anti-shake DSP and Photo Transport, it seems Casio wanted to give you as much as possible for the clams you were shelling out. (Clams. Shell. Get it? Har.)

With all these crazy features aside, the camera handles like a dream with a battery life that still manages to enthrall me. I took it out for a day in Virginia City and left it on most of the time, for those on the fly shots — and through two hours of picture taking and leaving it on, it never once flashed the recharge light to me. Did it die? Not once. The zoom feature proved unfoggy when pictures were transferred to the computer and with it’s simplistic docking, all I had to do when I got home was place it on the recharging dock and press a button. Boom! Those photos were on my computer without a second of hesitation. Personally, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better, easier to use digital camera on the market today that can stand up to the Casio Exilim. If you find one, email me here and let me know - we’ll review the camera and if it impresses us, we’ll send you a gadget from our TEK vaults.