DIGITAL CAMERA REVIEW: Casio High Speed Exilim

When I was at CES a few months ago, I was genuinely surprised by how much cool gear Casio has. I’m going to have to post those late pictures from my booth tour when I get back from my quick little trip to Disney. A lot of my CES coverage got delayed due to continued technical issues with the website. But moving to a new host provider will resolve these. Anyway, back to Casio. When I think of Casio, the first thing I think of is watches (and they gave us a cool digital watch for our Casio Swag bag) and Keyboards (because I own one of their awesome digital pianos.) But Casio also makes pretty nice Digital Cameras. Of course if what you need is take panoramic pictures you can get the best 360 camera for this purpose and get the best pictures ever.

I’ve been spending some quality time with their High Speed, 9.1 Mega Pixel, Exilim EX-FH20 High Speed Camera.  It also shoots video and supports SD and SDHC Memory Cards. You know, that thing that Jack Bauer didn’t recognize on last week’s 24.   With SD Cards going as high as 32 Gigs, this means not only do you have a nice digital camera; you have a digital camcorder that can record in High Def up to 720p.  The camera captures movies in a standard .AVI format, which means, you won’t be able to capture a lot of footage because uncompressed .AVI is huge.

[flickrset id=”72157614317193303″ thumbnail=”square”]

They are particularly proud of their High-Speed image capturing technology.  This camera will take up to 40 continuous shots in one second with the click of a button. It’s really cool stuff, I took some sample shots of a talking head from television and a) the image quality came out really nice, no glare, or solar flare on the image. The camera automatically stabilizes the images. When I take photos of televisions with my Nikon, it’s a nightmare, glare all over the place.

See how nice this shot came out. This is off my television on the auto setting with no flash.

One thing I always tell PR people is that I like to review tech from a general consumer perspective. When it comes to cameras this is especially true, because I’m not a photographer.  All I want to do is set the camera to auto mode and get some decent shots. This camera delivers nice shots in auto mode but you really have to play with the Best Shot feature to really get good use out of it. I tested this camera during a two-week period where it didn’t seem like the sun would ever come out and in some overcast conditions, the images came out really dark. When you use the flash they came out ok.  The flash doesn’t automatically pop up when it’s required, which I found a little irritating. In auto mode, that’s a basic thing that I expect. It won’t take the photo when there’s not enough light until you manually pop it up.

Notice, this shot is a little drab. Shot on an overcast day with Flash.

Random outdoor shot without flash, came out a little fuzzy.

Same Cloudy Day, with Flash.

Nice cloudy day shot using Flash.

Cloudy day without Flash

The Menu Navigation is a little intimidating, there are a ton options for the person who doesn’t want to use the auto mode.  The Auto Scene select feature on this camera is called Best Shot mode. To access this, you simply click the button that says BS (I’ll refrain…). It brings up an image gallery where you select what type of shot you want to take there are 18 prebuilt selections, everything from simple Night Scene to High Speed Anti-Shake. You can also create your own Best Shot macro settings.

Best Shot Menu

When you pick up the camera you’ll notice that it has some heft to it. It’s not heavy, but you do feel the weight. It doesn’t use recharcheable batteries; instead 6 double AA batteries power it.  I used some Panasonic Alkaline batteries and the power didn’t last too long, maybe about 4 hours during my test. However, bring enough backups with you and this isn’t an issue. It’s good-sized camera that has a nice grip on the handle and my thumb rests naturally on the shutter button.

For the price of this camera, it feels nicely built like it’ll survive a couple of drops. The 20x Optical and 4x Digital Zoom is really nice. It adjusts its auto focus pretty fast, faster than my Canon or Kodak digital cameras. Again, my Nikon doesn’t really zoom, it’s one of the many features I miss when I made the DSLR switch, and I’m not going to shell out another $800 for a decent zoom lens. The 3.0 preview screen is pretty sharp and clear. But I’m not sure if it produces an accurate representation of the picture when you preview the images. But then no preview screen really gives you a real sense of image quality.  It’s not a touchscreen, but the jog wheel works fine.

These camera photos were taken with my Nikon D60 on Auto with the Flash
turned off. Notice the difference?

This camera is in a weird place, it lays somewhere between folks like me who want to move beyond point and shoot pocket cameras to people who are looking at getting a DSLR based camera. Overall, I like this camera, I think $500 retail is a bit much for it, in that price range I expect a camera with a little more oomph to it and frankly better image quality on the auto settings. This produces some nice output, but nothing that makes you go, “wow, these are beautiful,” I’m sure in a more experienced hand you can get really pro level images, it certainly has the feature set to do so. I also love the fact that it supports SDCH Cards and that it shoots high-def video.

Final Grade B

Em Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally Posted, 2.24.09