Hands-On With Casio’s Slow-Mo Point-and-Shoot

When we reviewed it last summer, the Casio Exilim EX-F1 ($969.00) left little to dislike: in fact, its full HD video, high-speed burst shooting, and, best of all, slow-motion movies, won us over almost instantly. But as much as we loved it, we knew a couple things would keep many of our readers from buying it: it’s a chunky camera, approaching a DSLR in size. And with a list price of $999 we guessed that many customers wouldn’t be able to justify the splurge, especially not if a goofy, unnecessary feature like slow-motion shooting was one of the main selling points.

With the Exilims FC100 and FS10, announced this week, Casio seems to have pre-empted its customers’ concerns about the FX1, and even the HF2o ($599): they’re slim point-and-shoots, and cost $399 and $349, respectively, prices many people are prepared to pay for digital cameras. We got hands on with the FC100. Read on and check out the video to see why we’re so excited about this camera.

Same Simple Interface

We were plesantly surprised to see that although Casio’s slow-motion technology now lives in the body of a slim, point-and-shoot, devoid of the FX1’s complex array of buttons and toggles, the simple onscreen interface remained the same. We like how all of the major settings are listed along the right side of the screen, and that you can move through them using the up and down arrows on the navigational pad. We especially like that there’s an eight-point scale for high-speed shooting (1 being the slowest; 8, the fastest), so that you can customize just how painstakingly slow your movies are.

Changing Frame Rates on the Fly

When it came time to shoot, we just switched the filming toggle from high-def to high-speed mode, and pressed the record button. Users can choose from various frame rates (the highest is 1,000 fps). But these cameras introduce the option of toggling between slow-mo shooting and standard 30fps.

So, if you only want part of your movie to appear in slow-mo, you can press the OK button to switch frame rates on the fly. In general, we warn users not to push the frame rate too high, since the resolution drops and the picture becomes dimmer as you increase the frame rate. Besides, 300 or 400 fps is still fast enough for impressive slow-mo clips.

Cool New Features

In addition to cramming high speed shooting into a slim body, the 9-MP FC100 (as well as the FS10) shoots 720p video, has 5X optical zoom, and can shoot 30 frames per second at a still-decent 6-MP. Both cameras also have a neat dynamic photo picture, that can allows users to swap a new background into a photo with a moving subject. This feature is less essential to us than the slow-motion shooting (and hey, aren’t most things inferior to slow-mo filming?) but it’s still plenty cool. Want to create a digital greeting card, with your child dancing in front of a picture he drew? No problem.

YouTube -Friendly

Most of the time, when we say a camera or camcorder is “YouTube-friendly” we mean that it shoots at VGA resolution, comes with software that allows users to upload photos directly to the site, and, often, has a built-in USB connection. In the case of the FC100 (and FS10) YouTube-friendly takes on a whole new meaning. When in YouTube mode, the camera begins counting down from ten minutes as soon as you begin recording, since that’s the time limit for videos posted on YouTube. That means less editing and trimming for you to do once you’ve gotten the clip off the camera and onto your computer.