Hi
Today is an exciting day, at least for those narcissistic individuals who love to take photos of their own pretty faces.. I’m gonna talk about the NEW CASIO EX-ZR5000!
Okay for starters, Casio to me is better known for the awesome G-shock watches they make. I also own and love one of their Pro Trek series watches with compass, barometer and altimeter sensor for the unlikely times when I’ll be stranded outdoors with no freaking idea where I am.
Anyways, the only camera I know about them is the selfie camera you see those foreign Chinese people with shitload of money I have no idea where they got them from holding that magic camera which will turn ugly ducklings into plastic ducklings. Okay maybe thats not a very good description.. I mean that camera that will make-you-up even if you didn’t wear any make up.
But today, Claire brought home a camera that has something like that fitted inside it. The new Casio Exilim EX-ZR5000!
*Please note that the photos below are all straight from the camera in question. No post-edits done. Except for the pics of the camera itself, obviously.
Design and handling
Picking it up, I’m of course blowned away by the weight of this camera, mostly because I haven’t touch a compact point and shoot camera ever since I upgraded all my gears. The design is intuitive enough for me to not need to read the manual (which I always do) to know how to use the different features available. Check out my diagrams below as I describe the different parts of this cutesy mint green camera.
To be honest, I’ve seen smaller and more compact cameras than this, but they of course cost much much more. This camera is made of mostly plastic, it resembles a toy camera, something not to be taken seriously, and for that it can actually serve as a street photography camera, provided you choose a discreet colour. You can probably go right up to the subject and snap a shot and your subject might just brush you off for a mad man playing with a toy camera. The autofocus is super fast too. Fast as lightning, discreet like a ninja. One design feature that consistently find its way into the current point and shoot line ups is the rotating lens bezel. You can set it up to run different functions After using this camera for a while, its darn obvious that the main focus of this camera is taking photos of your face aka selfie. It has a screen that flips 180 degrees, it even turns on as you flip it, so bimbos won’t have to look for the on/off button right? 😀 Then theres an extra shutter button in front of the camera so its more ergonomic for taking steady shots of your pretty faces right? I have a thing about selfies because I don’t have a pretty face for pretty selfies, so pardon my sarcasm okay? xoxo ok? Features and Specifications Even though it has a ‘Make Up’ mode which can probably turn an average face into a freaking chio bu, it doesn’t save my ugly mug even if I max out its special effects. Yes you can fine tune your skin tone and smooth your skin with the Make Up function, cool right? But useless on this ugly mug (me), seems to have smoothed my face somewhat and gave me a halo of ‘dodged’ around my face, i say dodge referring to the dodge/burn tool on photoshop. Anyways there’s just too much to edit on my face, there’s no helping me. 
Maxed skin tone and smooth skin. Then there’s this Art mode that I over-utilized, out of the many other cool features of this camera. There are like 11 Art filters to choose from plus the 12th one which is a bracketing function for mixing some of the 11 filters to create a unique one. I’m over-killing the ‘Toy Camera’ filter, in fact 90% of my shots are in this filter, check it out. 
‘Toy Camera’ art filter
And so I went trigger happy on the camera shutter and snap lots of pictures, I’m definitely in love with the 19mm wide angle lens! At 19mm its so darn wide you can stand 1 m away from your subject and still able to capture enough background to crop into a panorama. Insane. But do take note to avoid putting parts of you near the edges of the frame as this camera do suffer from some distortion, you can always expect that with any lens this wide. One more thing is, usually really wide angle lenses also enable you to focus very close to your subject, you can even do a macro as shown below, some random mushrooms along the road.
I was about 10cm away from them shrooms.
The Casio ZR5000 as a 1/1.7in large sensor, its not as big as a dslr sensor, this is not a dslr what! But make no mistakes, this is a capable camera. In comparison, a mobile phone camera has a sensor size of 1/3″ or maybe 1/2.3″. So 1/1.7″ is almost 2x the size of a mobile phone camera, sensor size usually translate to better image quality so if you think mobile phone photos were good, photos from this cam would be 2x better isn’t it?
Did I mention that you can auto send photos to your mobilephone? You can make it in such a way that as you take the photos, your mobile phone will receive it. Cool right! You can do this using its onboard wifi or bluetooth transmitter. You can also link up with the camera and check your photos or even use your phone as a remote. Welcome to the digital age ladies and gentlemen.
diagram taken from casio site.
That’s about it from my experience using this camera, the rest of the boring specs can be found here.
Conclusion and Sample images by Me
Ok to be honest, I always thought these little point and shoot will never satisfy my thirst for sheer image quality, if I can afford it I’ll take the new Fujifilm GFX 50S medium format camera they just announced recently. But alas I am not well endowed in the finances department, so I’ll stick to my already excellent Sony A7 mk2 and my cute M-mount lenses. But this camera isn’t too shabby, the photos it take with the make up mode on was rather promising, its obvious of course, that something was done to our faces, but then everybody does that nowadays that even this level of editing is becoming the norm that most people simply accepts when they see it.
I think women will love this, I know Claire does.
This camera is really light and compact and offers so much convenience when I’m out with Wifey and all I want is to take some cute pictures together with her, its 19mm lens made it really easy to take a selfie and include the surroundings too. Can you imagine if your arms are not long and your mobile phone camera isn’t wide enough? Go to Paris and take a selfie, but cannot show the Eiffel Tower, what’s the point in that?
This camera offers more in general usage, its start up time and autofocus is speedy enough to catching fleeting moments, much faster than the mobile phone that’s always in my hand.
This will be a great camera for couples or people who likes to take selfies, I think someone like Claire would love it. Cute colours, 180° flip up screen for selfies, light weight and wide angle lens. Whats not to love?
Check out our gallery below:
blunder, forgot all about opening them box lids…
The retail price of the camera is as follows:
Black – $699
Pink, Green & White – $629
All cameras come with a 16GB SD Card + Camera Case. All prices above are inclusive of 7% GST.
Don’t say I good stuff never intro ah.. Go ahead to one of Casio Singapore’s authorized dealers e.g. Alan Photo (Sim Lim Square), Best Denki and Harvey Norman to test out the camera!
Over and out peeps.
Simon Tey
