Small Wonder Challenges Its Elders
I have a great digital camera with a 5 megapixel sensor and an amazing 10 X optical zoom lens. It takes excellent pictures and has a great deal to recommend it except for one flaw. It's too big to fit in my pocket. That might not sound like a big deal at first, but it can be if you suddenly come across that once in a lifetime photo op at a time when you don't have your camera handy because it was too big to take with you.
On the other hand, Casio just introduced a new digital camera that doesn't have the resolution or the zoom capabilities of my larger camera, but it has one big feature that can't be beat. It's tiny.
Casio claims its Card Exilim EX-S100 is the world's smallest digital camera with a zoom lens. 3.46 inches wide, 2.2 inches high and .66 inches thick, weighing in at less than 4 ounces, it is slightly thinner and lighter than the Konica-Minolta XG, another excellent pocket-sized camera with a 3x digital zoom lens.
This new Casio, which I've been carrying around for the past several days, is indeed a very nice camera. Not only is it small, but it's very fast and, by the way, it takes excellent pictures.
The camera, which is expected to be available in October, will have a suggested retail price of $399.
I started to appreciate the camera even before I turned it on. It has a slick stainless steel body that exudes cool. When you do press the power switch, it turns on almost instantly and is ready to take the first picture in under 2 seconds. What's more, barely over a second after you press the shutter, the camera is ready to take another picture.
That's worth noting, because many other digital cameras make you wait several seconds between shots, which can be a major problem because the world doesn't always wait for your camera to be ready.
Unlike the Minolta whose zoom lens is built into the camera body, the zoom on this model physically moves in and out, giving it the look and feel of a larger camera, despite its small size. At 2.8x, the zoom is slightly less than the typical 3x zoom you get with most digital cameras, but that's a pretty small price to pay for this level of miniaturization.
The camera also comes with 9.3 megabytes of internal memory, which is really only enough for a handful of pictures, but it does accommodate an SD memory card enabling it to store up to hundreds of pictures, depending on the capacity of the card you buy.
The camera feature that Casio refers to as "the world's first transparent ceramic lens" has, according to the company, the same light transmitting qualities as the optical glass commonly used in today's conventional camera lenses - with a higher refractive index and superior strength. Incorporating that lens into the camera has allowed Casio to reduce the size of the zoom mechanism by 20%.
Another nice feature is the oversized 2-inch LCD display. It gives you a very nice sense of the picture you're about to take and is a great way to show off your pictures soon after you take them. I know - you plan to print out your photos - but I find myself viewing and showing off pictures with the camera's built-in screen about as often as I show off prints.
One downside to this camera is that it doesn't have an optical viewfinder that you peer through like the ones on traditional point-and-shoot film cameras. Some people could care less about having that little hole near the top of the camera, but I still like shooting that way. Still, the LCD screen in this little camera is bright enough to be visible even on a sunny day. Maybe it's time I got used to using it rather than the old-fashioned viewfinder.
Another downside to this and all small cameras (and for that matter, most larger ones as well these days) is that it uses a proprietary battery. I love the fact that my older digital camera uses rechargeable or even alkaline AA batteries that are easier to replace but I've about given up on that now that most manufactures have adopted their own small lithium ion batteries rather than AA or AAA batteries.
Casio says you can get 180 pictures from a single charge. I haven't been counting but that seems pretty accurate. Fortunately, Casio is using the same NP-20 battery that it uses on older models. Casio charges $29 for an extra battery but you can get third party compatible knock-offs for a lot less. I saw one on eBay for $6.99 plus $2 shipping.
The camera's 3.2 megapixel sensor isn't as high a resolution as some of the cameras on the market but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. 3 megapixels is more than enough to take excellent 8 by 10 pictures and, frankly, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to want to blow up a photo any larger than that.
The only reasons you would need greater resolution is if you want to very large prints or if you think you're going to be doing a lot of cropping. If you crop out most of the image of a digital shot and then blow it up to 8 by 10, you might wish you had used a five or six megapixel camera but I've been using digital cameras for nearly 10 years and I've almost never done that.
I mostly use digital cameras the way I use regular point and shoot cameras. I frame my shot, take my picture and print it out. Sure, I'll do some cropping but an image from a 3.2 megapixel camera can handle a reasonable amount of cropping and still produce an excellent print.
Like many of today's digital cameras, the new Casio is also capable of taking short movies with audio. This is no substitute for a camcorder, but it is useful for taking very quick moving scenes
A syndicated technology columnist for nearly two decades, Larry Magid serves as on air Technology Analyst for CBS Radio News. His technology reports can be heard several times a week on the CBS Radio Network. Magid is the author of several books including "The Little PC Book."
By Larry Magid