You can snap up to 3264 x 2248 pixel shots with the S880, so it packs plenty of punch. It has a 3x optical zoom lens (and 4x digital zoom) that protrudes from the camera when you turn it on. When the camera is powered down, the lens is well protected by a built-in lens cover. The S880 has 10.8MB of internal storage. Naturally, you can boost this via SD, SDHC, MMC and MMC Plus memory cards.

You'll almost certainly want to invest in a memory card or two. Images are stored as JPEG, and a full res, high quality image eats up almost 5MB of storage. You can also capture short videos with the camera. The S880 records as QuickTime files with H.264 compression, while audio is saved as WAV files. The highest resolution/quality of movie you can capture is 848x480 resolution, 30 frames per second (fps), with monaural audio. The lowest is 320x240, at 15 fps with mono sound.

You connect the Exilim camera to your Mac via a USB-based cradle that lets you charge the camera even while you're downloading photos. On the negative side, you can't connect the S880 directly to your computer.

The Casio camera is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Casio says you get approximately 220 shots on a single charge (which takes about 2.5 hours). That's about in line with what I experienced.

The contrast detection AF system of the S880 takes care of focusing during normal auto focus mode and macro mode. There are also infinity focus and manual focus options. The focus area can be set to spot, multi-area, or tracking AF. The latter lets you obtain focus on a particular area of the frame. You can move the camera, but the focus point hangs steady.

Within the Best Shot menu, there’s a YouTube option that records videos optimized for YouTube (30 frames per second at 640 x 480 resolution) and allows you to upload the videos directly to YouTube. It works well. I personally probably wouldn't use such a feature every option, but there's a young age group that will. The Best Shot menu also sports 39 different settings, with multiple portrait options, nighttime photo options, and more. Now this is a feature I find very useful.

The EX-S880 has face detection and face recognition technology. In the normal setting, the camera will detect faces in the shot and automatically adjust the focus and exposure, then maintain itself until the shot is taken. The live preview puts a box around up to 10 faces detected by the camera. When you press the shutter release halfway, the box turns green for mugs on which the camera can focus. When a shot contains several faces, the camera highlights family members with colored boxes according to their priority and optimizes the settings.

Facial recognition will store photos of family members, friends and others, then automatically shift priority to those faces within the shot when the Family First option is turned on. It's impressive and works better than I expected, but still needs some tweaking. I think this is one of those technologies that needs time to mature. Other features include multi-point focusing, adjustable contrast, saturation and sharpness, a portrait enhancer for smoother skin tones and a dynamic range expander.

Except for the illogically located zoom button, the S880 is easy to use. For example, there's one shooting mode but two separate buttons for video and still photos. The camera takes good, if not great, photos. Flash pics were uniformly excellent, but outside shots lacked sharpness and distinction.

The EX-S880 is available in red and black and has a manufacturer's suggested retail price of US$299.99. There are cameras in its price range that offer more consistent photo quality, but the S880 is a good buy for its svelte form that's small enough to fit into a pocket, decent photo quality and ease of use.

Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10