Casio EX-S600 Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Good overall color, with pretty good saturation and hue accuracy.

The other important part of color rendition is hue accuracy. Hue is "what color" the color is. Though the EX-S600 often pushed cyan toward blue and red toward orange, overall color was pretty good, especially in green tones.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Nearly accurate color with the Manual white balance setting. Less than average positive exposure compensation required.

Color balance indoors under incandescent lighting was a little warm with the Auto white balance setting, and slightly magenta with the Incandescent option. With Manual, however, results were much closer to accurate. The Casio Exilim EX-S600 required less than the average amount of positive exposure compensation here, at only +0.7 EV. Overall color looks just about right, though the blue flowers are a bit dark and purplish. (Many digital cameras have trouble here, but results are still good overall.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

Outdoors, daylight
Bright colors overall, though high contrast under harsh lighting. Slightly better than average exposure accuracy.

Outdoors, the Casio Exilim EX-S600 produced very high contrast images, with hot highlights and deep shadows. The camera's lower contrast settings were very subtle, and really didn't help matters much at all under harsh lighting like the shots above. Both shadow and highlight detail were limited. Overall color, however, is pretty good, with generally good saturation.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
Moderately high resolution, 900 ~ 1000 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 900 lines per picture height (though you could argue for 1,000 lines horizontally), with extinction at around 1,300. Artifacts were visible as low as 800 lines. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail. Beware that while you might be able to make out what look like distinct lines at numbers higher than those we've mentioned here, the camera is just doing its best to continue interpreting the lines. So the lines you see at 1,200 and higher are really only artifacts generated by the camera's imaging system.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Reasonably sharp images overall, though some edge-enhancement on high-contrast subjects. Noise suppression limits detail in the shadows.

The Casio Exilim EX-S600 captures fairly sharp images, albeit with some visible edge enhancement artifacts on high-contrast subjects such as the crop above left. (Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.) In the leaves, bricks, and even the needles and branches in the background, the tonal handling results in a more paint-like effect however.

Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears. The crop above right shows this, with darker areas of Marti's hair showing limited detail. In addition to the noise suppression, some image noise is also getting in the way of detail definition.

ISO & Noise Performance
Moderate to high noise at the normal sensitivity settings, and very high noise at the highest settings.

Noise levels are moderate to high at the Exilim EX-S600's lower sensitivity settings, with some blurring in the fine details. At ISO 200 and 400, noise is much higher, with strong blurring.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
Fairly high resolution with good overall detail, but high contrast and limited shadow detail. Pretty good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images under average city street lighting and slightly darker conditions.

Sunlight:
Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

The Casio Exilim EX-S600 produced very high contrast with washed-out highlights and deep shadows under the harsh lighting of the test above. Noise suppression is visible in the shadows, as well as strong noise, contributing to the loss of detail there. I chose the +0.7 EV exposure, despite hot highlights. (In "real life" though, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.)

Low light:
The Casio Exilim EX-S600 captured bright images down to the 1/2 foot-candle light level (about 1/2 as bright as average city street lighting at night) at the lowest ISO settings. Though at ISO 400, images were bright to about 1/4 foot-candle. The camera's autofocus system was able to focus on the subject down to just above the 1/4 foot-candle light level with its AF assist light turned off, and down to the lowest light level with the AF assist. Do keep in mind though, that the longer shutter times necessary here absolutely demand the use of a tripod or other camera support to get sharp photos. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) For such applications, you may have better luck with a digital SLR camera, but even there, you'll likely need to set the focus manually. For information and reviews on digital SLRs, refer to our SLR review index page.

Coverage and Range
Fairly dim exposures at the default exposure setting, about average positive exposure compensation required. Pretty good range though.

Flash coverage was slightly uneven at wide angle, and still a little uneven at telephoto. Indoors, under incandescent background lighting, the Casio Exilim EX-S600's flash underexposed our subject at its default setting, requiring a +1.0 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get bright results. The camera's Night Portrait mode produced a more balanced exposure, and required less positive compensation at +0.7 EV. However, the longer exposure resulted in an orange color cast from the background incandescent lighting.

At wide angle, the EX-S600's flash was bright and powerful to about 16 feet. At telephoto, the flash was brightest only to about eight feet before decreasing in intensity.

Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims. In the shots above, the EX-S600 performs to Casio's specifications, producing bright exposures at the rated distances with its ISO set to Auto.

Print Quality
Mediocre print quality, somewhat muted color, good 8x10 inch prints. ISO 400 images are soft but usable at 5x7; higher ISO shots are only passable even at 4x6.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon i9900 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon i9900 review for details on that model.)

With the Casio EX-S600, we found that it had enough resolution to make good looking 8x10 inch prints. At 11x14, its prints were softer looking, just out of the realm of wall acceptability unless a simple subject fills the frame. At high ISO, image noise levels are too high beyond ISO 200, with ISO 400 and beyond essentially unusable above 4x6. It's really not the best performance we've seen, but understandable given the camera's small size.