At today’s Casio press conference, I lost a lot of faith. In the space of a year, they seem to have done the following:
- Added “artistic filters” to their cameras
- Increased speed of image processing by ~20%
- Decided 5x zoom wasn’t enough
The result is the shockingly bad Digital Art Frame and the marginally improved FH100, successor to the great FC100, my favorite compact digital. There are a number of minor improvements, and the body looks a little more solid, but it’s nothing to write home about. The best thing about it is it will probably drive down the price of the FS10 and FC100.
The minor improvements are the 14.1 megapixels, the 10x zoom (up from 3x or 5x), a feature I probably wouldn’t use (high speed zoom photography is a bad bet), and the burst speed has been increased to 40FPS from 30. You still can’t take more than 30 in a row, but they’ve upped the megapixel count on the burst photos to 9, which is certainly nice.