So let's just say you're a camera geek to the nth degree and your job is making stylish compact point and shoots. You hire a team of young, hip and trendy marketers to come up with a name for your latest design - a name that conveys that it's really excellent, but also really slim, probably the slimmest camera you've ever seen. They email back, after much thought - Exilim. Genius. You can see what they did there... But it gets your point across.

All the best bits about this camera hit you as soon as you open the box - it's superskinny, sexy racing green and has a huge viewfinder screen. If you look a little further, say actually read the box, you find it's not lost anything to it's anorexia, packing in all the features - 12 mp, 3x optical zoom and a gazillion 'Best Shot' modes and effects to make your snaps the most fun on facebook. Seriously - Dynamic Mode lets you take a shot of a mate then lift them out of the picture (by shooting the same wall without them) and paste them into another photo entirely (and they say the camera never lies!). You could have a lot of fun with this, plus all the features you would expect from a compact - modes for night shots, action, fireworks, you name it.

However, for me that's kind of where it ends. Being a high-fallutin photography buff, I have a massive and heavy SLR, so a superskinny camera to carry around in my pocket really works for me in theory - but I do need some muscle.
12megapixies is all very well, but if you're blowing up a photo to any reasonable size the lens is poor, the sensor is tiny and the zoom is weak so the quality of your images is not going to be fantastic.
However, if you're a total party girl looking for something to slip into the back pocket of your skinniest jeans and your photos end up on the web or nowhere, this is the camera for you.

That said, at £200 a go, you could get a lot more lens for your money - I would not pay this much for a camera that is rivalled by most mobile phones for picture quality, and while the Dynamic Photo mode is a laugh, you need to be fairly commited to use it regularly as it does take a bit more faff than simply point and shoot.

The S12 is like a supermodel - size zero, great to look at, a huge amount of fun to have at parties but not going to amount to anything of substance in the long run.

Available from www.casioatcarnaby.co.uk with an RRP of £200

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