Casio Exilim H30

UPDATE 07/07/2011: In line with our new, tighter test criteria, the Casio H30 is now a two-star camera rather than a three-star camera due to its limited picture quality.

Since the arrival of its first CMOS sensor cameras, Casio has stood out from the crowd for its super-speedy compacts with features such as 30x slow-motion video and 30 fps or 40 fps burst modes. Alongside that though, Casio is still making cameras that are technically very simple, relatively inexpensive and which use CCD sensors. The Exilim H30 is one of the latter, with a 16-Megapixel CCD and a 12.5x zoom that's equivalent to 24-300 mm. It makes a cheaper alternative to the higher-end ZR100.

Handling

The Casio H30 has a classic and fairly basic design. There's a shutter-release button with a zoom control around it, a video record button, a circular D-pad, a mode-selection dial and that's pretty much all. Although this camera does have A, S and M modes, the H30 is primarily intended for use in one of its Auto modes. The standard Auto mode is equivalent to P mode in most compacts, while the Superior Auto mode adapts the camera settings automatically to the scene in hand and only offers a few custom settings.


The screen is rather surprising. The 460,000-dot definition makes it sharp, clear and nice to use, and the viewing angles are very wide. Then there's the brightness. If ever you find you need a torch, you might as well just use this camera with a white image on-screen, as the brightness almost tops 800 cd/m²! This makes the screen easy to view in bright sunlight, in spite of the very glossy finish that's often seen in screens used in this kind of camera. A monster brightness typically makes the blacks look a bit washed out, but the 1400:1 contrast is still the highest contrast ratio we've seen in a digital camera yet, with the exception of models that use OLED screens, of course. In spite of these few tweaks that give the image more oomph, the screen's colour temperature is relatively stable. The gamma is a little low (light greys are a bit too light) but still perfectly acceptable, and the only real let-down is the colour fidelity, with an average delta E of 8.7 (this should be less than three for the colours to be considered accurate).

As is usually the way with Casio cameras, the menus are clear and simple, even if the only way you'd ever know there are several pages of options is thanks to the page numbers in the bottom right corner of the screen. On the whole, the H30 is a camera that's easy to use.

Finally, it's worth mentioning the H30's battery life as, like other models in the range, this compact camera seriously goes the distance. We didn't check the thousand-shot battery life exactly, but when a colleague took the camera on holiday for a week it still hadn't run out of battery when she brought it back!

Responsiveness

Like a lot of superzoom compacts, the H30 is a mixed bag in this field. It takes over two and a half seconds to switch on and take a photo and almost two seconds to save a shot, making it quite sluggish. Worse still, the H30 doesn't have a burst mode at all ... unless any of you would go so far as to call a 2-Megapixel mode a burst mode?!

On the other hand, the autofocus is very consistent, working in under half a second at all focal lengths and even in low-light conditions.

Picture Quality

Although Casio was one of the first manufacturers to start using CMOS sensors (at around about the same time as Sony), the H30 isn't equipped with this kind of technology: instead it has a bog-standard CCD. This 16-Megapixel CCD is no doubt very similar to the one seen in the Sony W570. Unfortunately though, Casio has never really been able to boast impressive image processing systems.



That's the main problem here too, as the H30 gets rid of digital noise by smoothing the image very heavily from 200 ISO. At 400 ISO smoothing is visible on 8" x 10" prints (20 x 27 cm), and at 800 ISO it'll even make a 4" x 6" print (11 x 15 cm) look like a hazy watercolour. At higher ISO settings, the image processing system just seems to give up completely and let the noise take over, with pictures that are literally riddled with fuzz no matter what size you print or view them at.


The H30 has a 24-300 mm lens that behaves in a remarkably similar way to lenses seen in some other compact this year, the Olympus VR-330 and SZ-20 in particular. At wide-angle settings the results are bog standard, with a sharp centre and noticeable softening around the edges. At around 200 mm, shots are consistently hazy across the frame and don't get much better at 300 mm. All in all then, the H30's lens is a long way off the kind of quality we've seen in this year's star superzoom compacts.

Video

The Casio H30 films 720p HD video at 24 frames per second. Speckles of noise are only too visible, the definition is nothing to write home about and the field of view is tighter than in photo mode. You can, however, use the optical zoom, and the minimum focusing distance is displayed to help you make sure you don't zoom in too far on close-up subjects.

Although the camera only has a mono microphone, the sound captured isn't too bad. Wind and whooshing noises are kept in check and distinct sounds can be clearly picked out. It's still a far cry from the kind of quality seen in stand-alone camcorders, but we've heard much worse.