To begin with, I will not do a lengthy listing of the specs of this camera. I leave that to the reviewers on professional sites. What I will try to do here is give a consumer perspective of this camera.

I bought this camera for $189 on Ebay in January. I did so after a good amount of research. After having used this camera for 2 months I sold it - it had BELOW AVERAGE IMAGE quality. BUT, that doesn't mean its not worth owning, I'd say it can be a very good camera depending on what you pay for it and what you need from it.

The camera takes some time to study the manual if you want to use all its functions. However, once you do that, the menu navigation system becomes VERY and intuitive easy to use. The physical buttons are well designed and the Camera as a whole has nice "heft" and physical build quality. Kudos to Casio: in that sense it felt like a luxury product. Too bad though they saved money elsewhere - in the wrong place IMO (more on that later).

The flash was very good. Unlike most small cameras, this one has a very strong flash that actually needs to be set on "weak", if you are taking something close to you.

The camera allows you to manually tweak EV, ISO and white balance (4 presets). Best of all, you have the option of turning on a live histogram so that you can see the image change as you tweak the EV, *before* you take the picture. I sed that live histogram lo - excellent feature in my view.

In addition to normal autofoucs, the QV-R40 has a very nice set of "best shot" options. These are basically scenarios to tweak the autofocus eg "twilight" or "night" or "food closeup" etc. These were very useful.

You can also use the camera in a "manual" mode. it still sets the aperture priority and exposure, but you can set the focus point manually with help from an on-screen aid.

HOWEVER, the image quality of the QV-R40 was NOT up to par in my opinion - irregardless of the tweaking capability. There was noticeable "noise"/fuzziness even in ordinary daylight pictures. I'm a beginner/medium level and I noticed after a while. My girlfriend, who is a bit more advanced camera user than me, picked op on this image issue too - very quickly.

For most uses (ie internet or 4x6 print a 3MP camera is fine, so if you have a 4MP like this the main reason is to make larger prints g (11" x 17") or to crop without losing quality. *But* that doesn't work if the camera produces fuzzy images.

This was why I sold it. Image quality is THE primary function of a Camera, so for me the camera would have to have some *overriding* other attribute like say the super small size of the Pentax Optio S4 for me to keep it. It didn't.

The camera uses AA size batteries. It gave excellent battery life (a couple hunderd pics) if you use Nimh rechargeable AA's or lithium AA's (eg the Energizer E2 AA lithium batteries). It can take normal alkaline AA's but you only get maybe 20 shots from that. So alkalines are a nice backup to have, but NOT something to rely on.

I found the QV-R40 to be small as 4MP camera go (88 x 60 x 32, 165 grams), BUT not quite small enough for what I call "jeans front pocket use". For me, any camera is most useful when you can just take it along without noticing. This camera was ever so slight too thick to fit like that - and it missed a ot of events for that reason. My next camera will definitely be significantly thinner than the QV-R40 and maybe a tiny tiny bit lighter.

Anyway, although I sold this camera, I will still say that it can be good "value" buy - if you have very basic needs and you get it at a good price to offset its disadvantages.

The excellent menu system and semi-manual features (eg histogram, EV adjust, ISO control etc) also make the QV-R40 an excellent camera for someone who wants to play around with those things, develop towards the intermediate photgraphy level and then maybe sell this camera for a better one.

Finally, given that this camera is mainly held back by image quality and not much else, it is well worthwhile to look at Casio's new models/updates of the QV-R40. They are: the QV-R51 (5MP)and the QV-R41(4MP). If Casio have fixed this image quality problem on those new ones (I don't know) and you do not mind the size of the camera, those could be excellent buys.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 189
This Camera is a Good Choice if You Want Something... Flexible Enough for Enthusiasts