Casio Exilim EX-FH20 review

Imagine the kind of action you could capture at 40fps! Even a professional DSLR can't come close to this high-speed Casio…

The FH20 achieves its astonishing speed using two specific bits of technology. One is a ‘continuous shutter’ that enables the image to be captured electronically at these high speeds and the other is a memory buffer capable of storing all of the image frames in the sequence without pause.

The size of this memory buffer is limited, of course. It has a capacity of 40 frames, which is therefore the maximum you can shoot in a single sequence. So while 40fps is spectacularly fast, you have to remember that you only get one second of shooting at this speed.

However, Casio’s included the ability to vary the shooting speed from anywhere between 1fps to 40fps, so you can choose for yourself how you want to trade off speed against duration, bearing in mind this 40-frame limit.

This isn’t the only limitation. This maximum speed of 40fps is achieved by reducing the image resolution to seven megapixels. If you shoot at 1-30fps you get eight megapixels, and you only get the full nine million pixels with stills.

The resolution reduction doesn’t really have a big impact on picture quality, but it’s an indication that you do need to keep your wits about you with the high-speed shooting modes, and that there are often trade-offs to be made.

It’s with the high-speed Movie mode that the trade-offs really start to hurt. The FH20’s 1,000fps maximum can only be achieved with a resolution of just 224 x 56 pixels. There might be some scientific applications where such a tiny resolution could still prove usable, but these aren’t movies as we know them. The nearest ‘proper’ movie resolution is 480 x 360 pixels, at which the maximum speed is a much lower (but still creditable) 210fps. At the other end of the scale, though, the Casio can shoot HD 1,280 x 720 movies at 30fps, which isn’t bad at all.

It doesn’t take long to realise with this camera that a 40-frame burst doesn’t get you too far when shooting at or near its maximum speed, but the Casio does have a very neat trick that at first sight seems impossible – it can record frames even before you press the shutter!

How can a camera predict when you’re going to start shooting? It doesn’t. This ‘pre-record’ function is activated by half-pressing the shutter release. The camera then keeps shooting for as long as the button’s half-pressed so that the buffer always contains the last 40 images. When the action starts, you press the shutter button the rest of the way. If you realise you’ve just missed the shot, you release it again immediately and the camera saves the 40 pre-recorded frames. If you time it right, you keep the Shutter button pressed to record 40 ‘new’ frames.

Despite its limitations and its complexities, Casio’s continuous shutter and high-speed shooting are a genuine innovation that no one else has attempted. With certain subjects, it can produce stunning high-speed sequences.

But not all the time. The main problem is the relative slowness of the AF at full zoom combined with a sensor-shift anti-shake system that has little if any effect on the steadiness of the image in the viewfinder. It’s hard to keep distant subjects centred long enough to focus on them, and if they’re moving rapidly too, it can become next to impossible. You can focus manually in advance and trust that the action’s going to take place at the distance you predict, but while that might work with a batsman at his crease in a cricket match, it’s not going to work for a goalmouth scramble at a football match.

A better image stabilisation system would help – the lens-based stabilisation used by Canon, for example, is much more effective at steadying the viewfinder image. Really, though, you need the optical clarity and speed of focus of a DSLR for this kind of work. The Casio has the high-speed shooting, but not the high-speed responses.

But it is really good in controlled, ‘slower’ environments. Its excellent Macro and Super Macro modes would make it a terrific camera for natural history, and its high-speed shooting would capture the flight of a bumblebee or a butterfly perfectly.

There’s a lot more to this camera than high-speed photography, though. The original high-speed Casio, the F1, suffered from being too expensive and too specialised. It was far too much to pay for a camera that was only really good at one thing, not least because of its extremely modest six-megapixel sensor. But Casio hasn’t made that mistake with the FH20. Its nine-megapixel sensor is only a million pixels behind the ten-megapixel sensors of rival compact superzooms, and that’s an insignificant amount. It has a 20x zoom, a range yet to be exceeded anywhere, which has a 26x wide-angle capability, too. What’s more, it includes full PASM exposure modes to make it an attractive choice for more experienced and demanding photographers.

It’s pretty good to use, too. The Mode dial on the top of the camera is given over to the various still, movie and high-speed shooting functions, and the exposure modes are switched using the menus, but that’s no great hardship because these are pretty well-designed. Routine adjustments like white balance, ISO and metering pattern can all be accomplished in moments, and the Casio can even shoot RAW files in the generic Adobe DNG format, though these do take a few seconds to save, and the camera is tied up while this is happening – and you can’t use the RAW format for high-speed shooting.

The picture quality is good, although not outstanding. The Casio produced a set of well-exposed test shots with good overall definition. There was some colour fringing, especially at longer focal lengths, where the definition tended to drop off a little too, but this is typical of superzooms in general.

Even without its high-speed shooting, the Casio is a competent enough compact superzoom. But with it, it becomes a camera that can take your photography places it has never been before.