The Casio V8 is a budget ultracompact camera that is one of the few on the market to offer a 7x zoom range - the 38-266mm lens doesn’t really have a wide-angle for travel use, but it does cover the 50-200mm portrait range effectively and is somewhat usable for getting close-ups of fast action.

While it has the zoom range for portraits and sports, the V8 lacks one of the key features to shoot them: decent high ISO ability. The Casio V8 has extremely poor high ISO ability, and anything but good daylight will either produce lots of blur or terribly noisy images, making it extremely difficult to shoot any kind of fast action sports or even fast-moving children and pets.

The Casio V8 does have a sensor-shift image stabilization system, however, which somewhat helps for low-light photos of static subjects, but in general, the V8 is still a poor low-light camera.

The V8 can continuously take photos at 1 frame per second. This is about average for a camera in this class, but not really enough to make a difference - within that 1 second, the peak action will have already elapsed. The V8 has average autofocus ability, and its below-average shutter lag also gets in the way of precisely timing fast action shots or pictures of children/pets.

The V8 can take 240 shots on each charge - just about enough for a day of travel.

The Sony T200 is a slim ultracompact (just 0.8 in thick) but manages to pack a large amount of features, including a moderate 35-175mm (5x) zoom lens that mostly covers the portrait range, doesn’t quite have the wide-angle for travel, but can zoom in for fast action closeups much further than most 3x zoom cameras in this class, although it still doesn’t quite get close enough.

The T200’s high ISO ability is average - it can handle fast action in daylight and pets and children in moderate low-light, but won’t really be capable of freezing any kind of fast action in low-light situations without producing excessive amounts of noise. The T200 also comes equipped with an image stabilization system which aids in low-light photos of static subjects.

The T200 can continuously take photos at 2.2 frames per second for a virtually unlimited number of photos - very good performance from a consumer compact, and one that will allow you to take a burst of photos, capturing nearly twice as many photos as a typical camera and letting you pick and choose the best shot or the peak moment of action, which will greatly increase your number of “keeper” photos. Like most consumer cameras that use what’s called a “contrast detection” autofocus, T200 can just about keep up with very fast-action in daytime situations, but it will be almost impossible to capture fast-action in low-light situations. Shutter lag on the T200 is extremely fast and shouldn’t be an issue.