New Casio Exilims the smallest and speediest yet
The high-speed Casio EX-FC100 fits a ton of neat features in a slim design.
(Credit: Casio)When they launched, Casio's high-speed Exilim models with frame rates of 1,000-plus frames per second (fps) wowed all but the purists in the digital photo community. But cameras like the EX-F1 and EX-FH20 are bulky and the features too difficult to use for many. So Casio put the circuitry in the dryer on High and popped out a sensor and chipset that packs its high-speed technology into tiny, easier-to-use digital camera packages: the 9-megapixel EX-FC100 and EX-FS10.
Casio EX-FS100 is the company's slimmest speed demon to date.
(Credit: Casio)The higher-end FC100 has a 5X zoom lens and sensor-shift optical stabilizer; the much thinner FS10 uses a 3X zoom and no stabilization. Otherwise, the cameras have the same feature set, with novel inclusions like 30fps burst shooting at 6 megapixels; and Lag Correction, a user-determined prerecord interval, which compensates for both slow human reflexes and hardware sluggishness. The cameras both have slow motion preview, which records at a high frame rate and plays back slowly to allow you to pick and save the best frame; and High-Speed Best selection, which automatically chooses the sharpest photo with wide-eyed and smiling people in it from a burst. They also shoot 720p movies for more traditional motion capture.
When they ship in March, the $349.99 EX-FS10 will be available in blue, gray, red, and white, and the $399.99 EX-FC100 will be available in gray and white.
Senior Editor Lori Grunin has been covering digital imaging for two decades, but her memory's kind of sketchy on the details. You can hear about it every week on Indecent Exposure, the podcast she co-hosts with Matt Fitzgerald.
