The New York Times’ David Pague must see a lot of stupid gadgets on a daily basis. We do here, so Lord knows how much he has to sift through. But this Casio camera, the Ex-F1, surely isn’t one of those. That’s the impression, at least, I get from his review.
The idea behind the camera is that, a lot of time, you’re anticipating a good picture, but you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen. Like, say, you’re at your kid’s baseball game and he’s at bat. You don’t know exactly when he’s going to make contact with the ball, but you have a general idea. What you do is press the main button halfway when you’re getting ready to shhot. Once the moment arrives—holy smokes he hit a home run—you press down all the way. The camera then goes back into its cache and grabs a number of the preceding frames as well as any photos post-button push. Hopefully you understood that.
Needless to say, Pogue liked the Ex-F1 quite a bit, though with some caveats. One, he says it’s still an amateur camera at heart—it’s no D3 or 1Ds anything. Also, it doesn’t have the best light sensor, so many photos will come out on the blurry side. Zooming is slow, too. And some other stuff, but it’s nit-picky. Best to appreciate the F1 for what it is, the first implementation of a really good idea. Now they (Casio or other camera companies) just need to make sure there’s a solid camera underneath that solid concept.