Need a digital camera to go with your Mini Cooper and your itsy-bitsy cell phone? You won't find anything much smaller or niftier than the 2-megapixel Casio Exilim EX-S20U, but you'll have to live with mediocre images and no zoom lens.

The Exilim owes its snazzy portability to its credit card dimensions, half-inch thickness, and feather-light weight of 3.5 ounces with battery and media installed. Though this tiny size can make the camera a bit tricky to grip comfortably, its buttons, controls, and menus are generally quick and easy to use, and the stainless steel body is well built and nicely finished.

Carefree snapshooting is the guiding principle of this Casio's feature set, but there's an unexpected extra here and there. Programmed auto is the only exposure mode, but there's a live histogram as well as exposure compensation to plus or minus 2 EV to help you fine-tune your settings. Available light sensitivities range from ISO 64 to 500, and white balance options include auto, four presets, and custom. The camera captures JPEG stills, and it can also record 320 x 240 M-JPEG silent video clips up to sixty seconds long.

To focus the Exilim's 37mm (35mm equivalent) lens, you select either of two fixed focus distance settings, infinity or macro, with a slide switch on the camera back. A 4X digital zoom function is the only option for extending the telephoto reach of the lens.

Fairly good performance augments this Casio's sleek design and decent feature set. The camera starts up in about two seconds; shutter delay is less than half a second; shot-to-shot time is just over a second; and there's almost no delay switching between record and playback modes. The 1.6-inch LCD is small, but it's reasonably sharp and bright, and it works well in outdoor light. The optical viewfinder, on the other hand, is not only tiny but also imprecise and distorted. It shows about 82% of the actual image. Also disappointing is the Exilim's maximum flash range of only five feet, but that's counter-balanced by the endurance of the camera's proprietary lithium-ion battery, which gave us a very respectable 200 shots per charge.

The Exilim's images are, unfortunately, its biggest letdown. Our test shots were generally well-exposed with adequately vibrant colors, but they're a little noisy and not particularly sharp, even by snapshot standards. We also noted vignetting, or light falloff at the edges of the frame, that was severe enough to show up in many scenes that would normally mask it.