Review rated by 17 Ciao members on average: very helpful
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The fantastic design and brilliant features make this a very good digital camera indeed. It combines the best of technology with the best in fashion to create what's described by Casio as "The wearable card camera".
The camera is incredibly small, the height and width of a credit card and about 1cm in depth! So small in fact that Casio had to design a slim line battery specifically for the product.
Just because the camera's tiny doesn't mean you miss out on great features you'd expect from a bulky camera. The camera has a standard sized colour screen on the back for viewing the lens' view and reviewing your pictures and video recordings. There is a slot for Secure digital/Multimedia cards on the bottom (allowing you to easily expand the cameras
on-board 12mb memory) as well as a powerful flash and long lasting lithium battery.
The Casio Exilim also comes with a PC / Charging cradle, so when you want to transfer pictures to your computer you simply drop the camera into the cradle and with in a few seconds the high quality pictures are up on your computer screen.
The camera has 3 levels of quality (Fine, Normal and Economy) and 3 levels of resolution (1600x1200, 1280x960 and 640x480). I always use the Fine quality and highest resolution to get the best quality pictures. The cameras 12mb built in memory will hold only 10 pictures in the highest quality and resolution and 120 in the lowest settings. I bought a 32mb secure digital card separately to increase the memory. With the card in I can store 36 pictures in highest resolution and quality and a whopping 421 pictures in the lowest resolution and quality. Of course like any digital camera you can mix and match the settings to suit your own needs.
The camera has three different record modes, which are, Picture mode, Video record mode and night time scene mode. The camera also features a ten second self-timer and red eye reduction. This handy feature fires the flash twice, the first time is to close your subject’s pupils so that there is less red eye in your end photo. There is also EV Shift and white balance settings so you can capture accurately coloured pictures.
The camera also allows you to create a couple of 30-second videos and play them back on your camera, or transfer them to your computer as AVI files.
Once you’ve taken a photo you can then zoom in on it, protect it, resize it, copy it to a memory card, or add it to your favourite pictures. The camera also supports DPOF, this allows you to select which photos you want printed and the quantity, then, when you insert the memory card into a DPOF compatible printer those pictures can be automatically printed out without the need for a PC.
The camera comes with a CD ROM containing the camera transfer software (compatible with Windows and Mac) but as I use Windows XP I didn’t bother installing it. As soon as I connected the camera up (via the cradle) Windows XP installed the camera as a removable drive in My Computer. I then set the AutoPlay settings to open the pictures in the Windows XP Camera and Scanner wizard.
The camera has 4x digital zoom which means the camera resizes the picture by up to 4x but by resizing the picture you are making each pixel bigger which means you loose the quality. If the camera had optical zoom (a moving lens) then the camera would be a hell of a lot better, but in such a small camera optical zoom would be very difficult to implement.
The camera takes pictures at 1.2 mega pixels, which by today’s standards isn’t that good if your looking to take very high quality pictures but for the average home user the Exilim is perfect. If you do want slightly better quality in your pictures then you may want to consider the Exilim S2, which is 2 mega pixels, but the difference would be almost unnoticeable.
Also, the cameras 4-way navigation button is very awkward because it’s so small, you will probably find that you keep pressing it in the wrong direction. Casio could have quite easily made this button a lot bigger, there’s loads of room for it.
To summarize, The Casio Exilim is a fantastic camera, it looks great and is great. If you want to be the envy of all your friends then you should defiantly get this camera. The size means you can take it anywhere; it will quite easily fit in any pocket, no matter how small. It has a retail price of £250 but I picked mine up on the Internet for £180. I also bought a memory card (£20) and the Exilim leather case (£20), so it cost me £220 in total, which I think is excellent price for such a marvellous camera.
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to go digital fashionably.
Hi and welcome to ciao. What a superb first op. If you keep this up then you will be in my Circle of trust pretty damned quickly. Drop me a line via my guestbook when you write another op. D.
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18.02.2003 21:17
This is a great first op, well done and keep it up. x
12.01.2003 15:41
Hi and welcome to ciao. What a superb first op. If you keep this up then you will be in my Circle of trust pretty damned quickly. Drop me a line via my guestbook when you write another op. D.
12.01.2003 11:44
This is a great first op. Very detailed. Welcome