Not more than a few months after releasing the EX-Z850, an 8.5mp pocket camera for $399, Casio has released the EX-Z1000 for, you guessed it, $399.

Why would anyone want a measly 8.5mp when they could get 10.1mp for the same price? The short answer is that these two cameras are very different beasts. While they share the same Exilim engine, the similarities stop there.

For starters, the Z1000 is a bit easier to use overall and has a cleaner design. Gone is the selection mode wheel with its aperture and shutter priority, and fully manual modes. Instead, all of your setup features as to size, picture quality, white balance, ISO, and so on is done by easily navigable menus. We lose some manual controls such as aperture and speed priorities, but I'm not sure the audience for this camera is going to be all that upset.

Also gone is the useless viewfinder window, which is not exactly necessary when you're sporting a 2.8-inch LCD screen. The Z1000 is currently the only Exilim camera to use this screen size. The screen is so big and wide, in fact, that it's wider than a normal photo's aspect ratio. That is, when viewing photos in wide mode, you don't actually see the full frame as the tops and bottoms are cut off.

Like all Exilim cameras, the Z1000 boasts a super-fast shutter and extraordinary battery life. There's virtually no lag time between pressing the shutter button and actually taking the picture. If you're using flash, you need to wait a bit between photos for the flash to recharge, but if you want to fire off three flash pictures in a row, you can use the very nifty and effective rapid flash.

The new Display button allows you to gain quick access to the camera's various display functions in both capture and view modes. You can adjust screen layout -- wide or normal -- adjust screen brightness, turn on histogram, or set the "Type" of display to Dynamic, Vivid, Real, Night, or Power Saving. There was a slight noticeable difference in brightness and I'm sure Casio engineers get ecstatic over numbers like 1200cd/m2 *5 as described in the sales literature, but frankly, there wasn't that much of a difference.

In lieu of hordes of manual settings, the Z1000 includes 37 presets in Best Shot mode which really help the amateur photographer capture up-close flowers, portraits, night scenes, action shots and so on. While most new quality cameras have at least some presets, Casio is now using them to apply what is essentially photo-editing and manipulation techniques on the fly. A couple of the most interesting presets are eBay mode (for easy transfer and display on eBay), illustration mode (for arty-farty illustration-like images), and some really cool presets for photographing text, white boards and business cards that include keystone correction to eliminates distortion caused by the camera being at an angle to the subject.

A very unusual feature called Zoom Continuous Shutter lets you frame both telephoto and zoom shots -- then take them both at the same time!

A preset called "Old Photo" is designed for bringing old print photographs back from the dead. The idea is that you actually take a new digital picture of an old-and-faded print photograph. The "Old Photo" function will bring the colors back to life and give you a photo suitable for framing.

Though real photo-geeks would likely use PhotoShop to manipulate their clean images, I suspect there are a lot of people out there who don't want to buy a $649 image editing application -- or spend the three years it takes to learn how to use it.

The EX-Z1000 is clearly aimed at the more-pixels-are-better-crowd, and not at photographers who want to fine tune their photography beyond using presets. One thing to take into account with a 10-megapixel camera, is that the file size is really big.

Files come in at about 4.5 megabytes each at the largest and finest settings. Sure, memory is cheap, but you can chew up a lot of memory with a vacation's worth of pictures. Throw in a couple two- or three-minute videos (25 frame-per-second movies at 640 x 480 resolution produce 10 MB-per-second files) and you can fill up a 512mg SD card in no time, not to mention the extended download time from camera to desktop.

At the same price as the old-and-busted EX-Z850, the new-hotness Casio is packed with extremely powerful features for amateur photography.