Digital Home Thoughts: Casio Launches a Pair of Superzooms

"The Casio Exilim EX-FH25 is a new hi-zoom camera with a 26-520mm equivalent lens and a high-speed, high-sensitivity 10-megapixel CMOS imager. Featuring sensor-shift image stabilisation, the Casio EX-FH25 can capture photographs at up to 30 frames per second (fps) and a resolution of 9 megapixels."

Casio just announced a pair of superzooms, the EX-FH25 and the EX-H5. The EX-FH25, being part of the "F" lineup, offers consumer high speed videos which even now is mostly Casio's domain. Being able to do high speed videos can be fun; just don't try the 1000 FPS option since the resulting resolution is normally in the range of useless. The EX-H5 is a compact superzoom offering a 24-240mm equivalent zoom lens, joining the party started by Panasonic with its TZ series.

It has been some time since Casio had a really competitive camera that could take on the likes of Canon and Sony, which were the EX-Z750 and the EX-Z850 way back in 2005/2006. Both were well-made compacts that were small, fast (back in 2005 shutter lag was a real concern) and laden with controls. Since then they've produced cameras with no better or worse image quality as the megapixels kept on going up. Shame really, since I liked those cameras.

I haven't tried the newer F-series cameras, but the first batch weren't too hot in terms of image quality vs price. I hope that the new ones are much better, because it would be a real pity to lose Casio's unique feature set (take a look at their Best Shot modes sometime) in the marketplace.