Casio Exilim EX-H10

After Samsung and Olympus, and before them Fuji, now it's Casio's turn to offer a compact with a 10x zoom to compete with Panasonic and Canon, who, for a long time, were the only ones with a foothold in this section of the market.

Casio too has opted for an ultra wide-angle lens which starts at the equivalent of 24 mm and has added a powerful series of automatic modes and an extremely hardy battery which promises a battery life of 1000 photos in between recharges.

Handling

Like other cameras of this type, the Casio Exilim H10 is a compact with a rather imposing frame.  It's slimmer than the average,
measuring 2.8 cm--although Casio claims 2.4 cm in its specification, not taking into account the ring around the lens--but it's clearly a lot bigger than a camera like the Canon Ixus 110 IS or the Panasonic Lumix FX40.  The handling suffers a little from this: although the front includes a small bulge by way of a handle, like on some Panasonic cameras.  It's a little too short and the camera has a tendency to slide away under its own weight.

The camera has been carefully put together, despite the fact that its frame is almost entirely made of plastic.  It has been produced fairly accurately, the buttons fit well and the whole thing gives the impression of quality ... as long as you don't try and compare to the excellent TZ6 and TZ7 from Panasoinc.  The 3'' screen is large but doesn't have a very high resolution.  One strength is that finger marks are hard to see except in direct light.


The controls are nicely done, with a moderate number of buttons--despite the questionable inclusion of direct shortcuts for 'Vivid Landscape' and 'Make up' modes--and the menus are attractive.  In general, everything is pretty clear and intuitive, without cutting back on any advanced features.   There's still a real-time histogram, for instance.

Casio has more work to do to convince us that its cameras are responsive, though.  Although it takes a reasonable amount of time to power up and focuses quickly in wide-angle mode with good light conditions, it's a lot less reliable in telephoto and sometimes doesn't manage at all, especially when the subject is moving.  Using face detection hardly helps: it won't win any awards for speed land takes several seconds to identify a face, even when it's looking directly at the camera.

It does, however, have one undeniable strength: we didn't have to recharge the battery at all during all of our tests.  We didn't have it long enough to test the claim that it can last for 1000 photos, but it's clear that the H10 has a clearly lead over the competition--which is often limited to fewer than 300 photos.

Image Quality

Taking on giants like Panasonic and Canon, who both successfully combine intelligent optics and high-end image processing, isn't an obvious task.  The H10, then, like all the other superzoom compacts, has been highly awaited.

The first thing that we noticed, as soon as we tried photos of geometric objects with strong contrast--buildings against the sky, for instance--were chromatic aberrations.  They were especially visible around the edge of the frame in wide-angle mode (the photo left is at 24 mm), they get better as you zoom in without ever disappearing entirely.  At the shortest focal length, the distortion is also very strong.  These are all problems that Panasonic in particular manages to get rid off by applying a software post-treatment that's configured for its lenses, with remarkable results.

Worse still, the lens on the H10 isn't exactly the most even.  It's sharp enough--but nothing exceptional--in the centre of the frame, it's very blurry around the outside and delicate details like hair or leaves end up a jumbled mess.

Given the presence of a 12 Megapixel sensor, the sensitivity results were nothing surprising.  Electronic noise is present at every sensitivity at full size, but the degradation in image quality (noise and blurriness) becomes evident at 400 ISO and a nuisance at 800 ISO.


In video mode, the image is detailed enough (which is what you'd expect from 720p HD), but blurriness is very visible in the shadows.  The optical zoom doesn't work while filming and the sound input is typical of most compact cameras: not accurate enough, without much detail, easily saturated, and, finally, limited to mono.  We were happy to make to do with that until recently, but since the arrival of models with stereo sound recording and microphones that can record at an acceptable quality while zooming silently in video mode, anybody looking forward to using video will want to leave such limited models behind.