Well my good old Canon S230 that I have used for many years and with which I took thousands of photos that you can see on my website has finally died on the last day of my Puerto Rico trip. Although the camera still was able to take photos, the display stopped working. But the good news is that I was thinking of upgrading anyway and this just sped up the process.

After a long debate between the lastest Canon Digital Elph Model SD500 and the latest Casio Exilim EX-750 I ended up going for Casio. This was a diverge from the Canon Digital Elph line that I've been loyal to from the first model S100, to S200 and to S230.

The deciding factor that made me steer towards the Casio camera is its video performance which has two advantages:

Casio's MPEG4 Movie Codec

Both cameras capture video at 30 frames per second. But Casio uses MPEG4 codec while Canon use Motion JPEG. What that means is that Casio's movie files are roughly a third in size of Canon's so I can fit 3 times as much of the video footage on the Casio.

Casio's Movie Audio Quality

What is surprising to me that Canon is capable of taking Video with quality almost as good as DVD, but the sound still sucks big time. It uses PCM compression at only 8 bit and 11 Khz which makes the bit rate 88 kbps. Casio uses MP3 compression at 4 Bits at 44 Khz which makes 176 kbps bit rate. With MP3 compression you can store much more audio data with that bit rate than with PCM, so the sound is almost CD quality.

I purchased my Casio at TechToysForLess.com for $367 which was the cheapest deal I could find. I was actually skeptical about buying the camera from them, but decided to bite the bullet. When I got the camera, I was relieved because it looked brand new as advertized.

So far I love it! The video quality is amazing, so be prepared or the higher quality videos on my website. I love the huge 2.5" screen too. It's very close to the size of my Treo 650. Let the snapping begin!

Here are the detailed reviews of the camera:

DPReview.com Steve's Digicams DC Resource Ken Rockwell

Casio Z750 User Manual

Update - July, 2005

I had to ship my camera to repair because of the focus problem that started to happen. I guess it happend because of multiple lens errors that I've had. The camere repair took more than 10 days. The replaced the lens assembly and the problem went away.

Update - August 25, 2005

Casio released AVI component for the Mac so that the video clips from the camera can be played back. Click here to download.