In addition to the usual cast of characters, such as Sunset, Night Portrait, and Fireworks modes, a few unique modes join the mix. You get a Slide Panorama mode, which lets you take a 360-degree panoramic shot simply by pressing the shutter and panning the camera horizontally; Soft Flowing Water, which uses a slow shutter speed to soften up images of moving water; an Autumn Leaves mode, which boosts red hues and enhances contrast; and self-portrait modes for one or two people. The camera also provides details about what each scene option does to the in-camera settings, which is a nice touch. In addition, you get a handy selection of color filters that you can overlay on your shots as you take them, a lot like working with flash gels.
The craziest feature by far is the camera's , which lets you overlay animated animals, text, or other cartoony graphics over your images. You can overlay animations and preview them right in the camera, and Casio offers a Dynamic Photo Manager as a free (but separate) download that lets you create animated GIFs or movies from your creations on your computer.
The Casio Exilim EX-H20G is definitely geared more toward fun and futuristic features than it is toward traditional meat-and-potatoes performance. In some respects this is a bad thing: The camera's startup-to-first-shot time is slow, as it takes around 2 seconds to power on and get ready to shoot, and it has no burst mode at all, which is especially surprising given Casio's range of .
A few focusing options are in the mix, but notable performance issues affect some of them. The EX-H20G's autofocus generally performs well, and a motion-tracking autofocus mode is available to help keep fast-moving objects in sharp view. However, the camera's macro capabilities are mediocre at best--you can get only about 4 inches from a subject without producing a blurry shot--and its manual focus needs a bit of work, as well.
While using manual focus, we found it hard to get a crisp shot of close-up subjects, and we could really hear its inner gears churning while we were manually focusing the camera.