Casio Exilim

Exilim is a brand of digital cameras introduced in 2002 by Casio.

The Exilim Card series was notably thinner than other small digital cameras at the time of its introduction, typically 10–15 millimetres thick compared to other manufacturers' comparable models that were 25–35 millimetres thick. This sparked competition to make slimmer compact digital cameras, with other manufacturers bringing out lines of comparably thin cameras from 2004.

Features

The Exilim Card series are ultra-compact models. The cameras were first branded as "Wearable Card Cameras" and are about the size of a credit card and 9mm-16mm thick. The early models only had digital zoom, though more recent models have optical zoom as well.

The Exilim Zoom series is the all-purpose line, all including an optical zoom. Several newer models support H.264 video compression which uses much less storage than Motion JPEG format.

The Exilim Professional is the bridge digital camera line, with higher-quality optics and greater zoom.

All models use Secure Digital (SD) or Multi Media Card (MMC). They come with a small amount of internal memory and therefore are not bundled with a memory card. Many Exilim cameras come with a bundled charging and docking cradle. The cradle is used to recharge the camera's battery and to connect the camera to a PC or PictBridge compatible printer.

Images are recorded as JPEGs with Exif data. Raw images from the CCD are not available by default, though on some models a service menu can be accessed allowing images to be recorded as the raw data [ [http://www.inweb.ch/foto/rawformat.html raw data] ] .

Most models use a Casio proprietary lithium ion battery, though some use AA cells. All the later models have 2.5" or wider LCD screens and come with more than 20 shooting modes.

MPEG-4 video with H.264 compression

In 2007, several Exilim models introduced support for highly compressed H.264 video in 848x480(HQ Wide), 640x480(HQ/Normal), 320x240(LP) modes. One benefit of H.264 is that it uses much less storage than Motion JPEG, a popular video format for consumer digital cameras. However, videos are limited to 10 minutes in China, DI, EU, and UK.

Exilim models that incorporate MPEG-4 video benefit from extended recording times due to higher quality compression. On "normal" quality, MPEG-4 allows more than an hour of 640x480, 30fps video to be recorded on a 1GB memory card.

Apple Computer's QuickTime video player could for some time not play the MPEG-4 files created with the specific codec that Casio uses. Casio's original response to this incompatibility was, "Movies recorded with this camera cannot by played back on a Macintosh." Casio later bundled an "AVI Importer" software to convert MPEG-4 videos into a format that QuickTime can decode. Applications other than QuickTime, like VLC and MPlayer, are also available that can read the videos without conversion, as can more recent QuickTime versions.

The EX-Z1200 introduces H.264 video.

Bundled software

All Exilim cameras come with bundled software:

* PhotoLoader — Casio's software to automatically copy pictures to a hard drive.
* Photohands — Casio's image editing software. Photohands allows rotation and resizing of images and print a picture with the date superimposed.
* Camera User's Guide — the manual for the camera.
* Adobe Acrobat Reader — to read the Camera User's Guide, which is a PDF.
* AVI Importer
* Ulead Movie Wizard — used for editing movies software (bundled with the EX-Z750, EX-V7 and EX-Z850).

Drawbacks

64-Bit drivers have as of yet not been released, making this camera unable to download images on Windows XP x64 or Vista x64 editions.

Table of models

Cameras whose model number ends in U (e.g. EX-Z4U) are models only released in North America, without some of the functions of the non-U models.

M models are based on the corresponding S model but also record audio (as WAV) and play back WAV and MP3.

Casio's NP-20 batteries are claimed to hold 630 mAh of charge, while the thicker NP-40 is rated for 1230 mAh.

References

External links

* [http://world.casio.com/qv/download/en/manual/ Casio's Exilim product manuals]
* [http://world.casio.com/qv/support/en/faq.html Casio camera FAQs]