Fantastic take everywhere camera. Standout features are (i) excellent image detail (ii) tremendous auto white balance, best appreciated on a calibrated monitor (iii) very easy to use (iv) highly portable and unobtrusive. If the camera is held super steady, the pictures can be sharp too. At the highest quality settings, the files allow for significant crops and enlargements.
The lens is competent enough and does the job. The let down is that it's not wide enough at the wide end and is pointlessly long at the long end. In 35mm terms, it is a 37-111 zoom; a 24-70mm would have been more useful for day to day and travel snaps. The longer focal lengths are unusable handheld because they greatly magnify vibration and the really unimpressive anti-shake system is of little help there. A shorter, wider, optically superior lens would have given the camera more bite. To be fair, though, most comparable compacts have the same lens coverage; even the Canon G9 does not go much wider, but Casio could have been more innovative and daring.
The packaged software transfers images to a computer but does nothing beyond that. For non-destructive jpeg editing, Picasa is necessary and is brilliant.
My unit persistently overexposes so I routinely reset exposure to EV -0.7 or more before each shot. The -0.7 setting is lost at power-off and has to be reset at each power-on which is very frustrating. If there's a way to store this setting, I still haven't found it.
The z1200 gets 5 stars because if I were buying again today, this is the one I'd get. Used with discipline and imagination, the results are frequently breathtaking.
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