Review: Casio Exilim EX-FC100
I use a DSLR and I love it, and while I appreciate what point-and-shoots do, I’ve never really wanted one. This is partly due to the superior picture-taking ability of a DSLR, but mostly it’s other cameras’ unimaginative feature lists. The latest cameras boast huge numbers of features which I would never use (smile shutter? more megapixels on a tiny sensor?), and stubbornly refuse to include any that I would.
Imagine my delight, then, upon finding a camera which not only fulfills my expectations of a point-and-shoot, but also takes steps toward being a such a useful imaging device that any photographer or cinematographer would be proud to own one. At the risk of sounding dramatic, the Casio Exilim EX-FC100 is such a camera. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the after the personal computer and the smartphone, the EX-FC100 is the most versatile piece of electronics I’ve ever used.
Now, I don’t want to imply by my fawning opening that this is a perfect camera. But it has its priorities in the right places, and it has some of the features I have been expecting (in vain) for years. If you need a demonstration of this, check out our first slow-mo reel and then the second one, which should be publishing concurrently with this review.
It’s the sensor, stupid
What the EX-FC100 does, in a nutshell, is use the sensor in more ways than the two that are on every camera, to wit, taking pictures at one of several sizes and making 30fps video. Few cameras offer significantly more than these functions, even if they garnish them with face detection and the like. There are no limitations on a camera’s sensor which prevent it from doing other things, are there? So why haven’t companies like Sony and Panasonic put out something that uses it more creatively? Search me. So it’s up to the old man in the business, Casio, to break the mold. The EX-F1 that came out last year was a breakthrough to be sure, but its megazoom form factor and high price made it a difficult camera to recommend. No more with the EX-FC100 and its slightly smaller brother, the FS10 (which I will now refer to collectively as “Exilims” or “Casios” since I don’t like writing model numbers). So the features aren’t new, exactly, so much as they’ve been democratized.
Now is a good time to note that the two cameras are mostly identical, except that the FS10 has a smaller 3x zoom instead of 5x, while being significantly slimmer and having a slightly higher max shutter speed. They both offer all the features I’m about to talk about. The pictures are of the EX-FC100.
High-speed, slow motion
By now you must know about the Exilim’s high-speed photography option. If so, skip to the end of this paragraph. If not, it’s like this: the Exilim can shoot normal 30fps 
720p video, which looks perfectly decent. But you can also shoot up to 1000fps, reducing action to a tiny fraction (<4%) of its normal speed. It does this by only taking the information from a small part of the CMOS sensor — the smaller the area, the faster it can pull the information off to make a frame before starting over. So at 1000fps, you're working with a 224x64 resolution, which to be honest is almost useless. Fortunately shooting at that speed is equally useless: it renders a finger snapping into a 30-second clip that is unbelievably boring. Luckily you can also choose 420fps at 224
Category: Electronica de Consumo, General, Móviles, Video, videos
