Product Reviews

At just 13.7mm at its skinniest point, the EX-S500 is spectacularly thin. Hit the power button, though, and the lens extends in three sections to provide a 3x zoom range. If nothing else, this camera is an amazing feat of compact engineering.

Fortunately, it has other commendable traits, too. Paltry internal memory aside, it's well specified with a 5-megapixel CCD, 2.2" LCD screen and the ability to record VGA-resolution video in MPEG-4 format. The lithium-ion battery is necessarily skinny and has only a 700mAh capacity, but it still managed to power the camera through 300 shots on a single charge, which is impressive. The only downsides to

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the slim design are that it isn't the most comfortable camera to hold, and removing cards from the SD slot can be tricky. Still, with a supplied cradle for USB transfers and recharging, you may never need to do so.

The camera is extremely fast, taking just over a second to start up and take a photo. There's a four-second gap between shots, but this falls to 2.5 seconds in Continuous mode. You can browse photos stored in memory at lightning speed, and flicking quickly through them gives the impression of a video animation. The buttons and menus are quick to use too. We particularly like the separate shutter buttons for photos and movies, and the speech bubbles that momentarily appear onscreen next to icons to explain their meaning.

Image quality was often excellent in our tests, giving photos warm, natural colours and as much detail as we'd expect from a 5-megapixel sensor. Low-light shots without the flash were rather grainy and sometimes underexposed, unless we delved into the S500's various scene presets. There are no manual exposure controls. Still, most of shots we took with the camera were either decent or superb.

The S500 isn't for enthusiasts, but as a friendly camera that you can take anywhere, it's ideal.