The Casio Exilim Card EX-S10 couldn't get much sleeker or thinner. Do its photographs live up to its exterior?
Review summary of the Casio Exilim Card EX-S10:
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Scoreboard » Features » Side-by-side » Gallery » |
 The Casio Exilim Card EX-S10's strengths lie in its attractive styling, it automatic-shutter modes, and its top-notch video. It's image quality isn't quite as notable for its price-point - we would have preferred its larger sensor be wed to fewer pixels for better noise-management and more dynamic contrast - but its photographs are by no means a deal breaker. For those searching for a cool looking camera that takes good photos and packs features galore, the EX-S10 could fit the bill. Release: March 2008. Price: $250.
Pros: Nice looking. Good auto-shutter modes. Above average video quality. Very thin.
Cons: Pictures are a bit noisy. Sub-par viewfinder.
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Full Casio Exilim Card EX-S10 Review:
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Design - Excellent
Lightweight, thin, and impeccably designed, the Casio Exilim EX-S10 is a superb looking camera that is easy to handle, to boot. With a footprint comparable to a cigarette case, it's small enough to slip into a shirt pocket, and with a reflective but tastefully colored exterior, it's definitely classy enough to pull out at a party and not be ‘that dweeb with the camera.'
The front features tasteful, circular accents around the lens itself, and the back is devoted almost entirely to the 2.7-inch LCD viewfinder. To its right is the camera's sparse but effective controls, including four shortcut buttons, a four-way controller, and a record-button devoted to video. On top the power button is understandably tiny, given the camera's thumbnail thickness, and next to that is the shutter release. To our pleasure and surprise, Casio has wrapped the zoom control around the shutter, which we feel is considerably handier than a two-way button. Our only complaint is that Casio persists in labeling their scene-mode button ‘BS' (for "Best Shot"), but its at most a wisp of a flaw that hardly detracts from the EX-S10's svelte stylings.
Features - Very good
In short, the only thing the EX-S10 lacks is optical image-stabilization. Even that is somewhat ameliorated by Casio's array of advanced automatic-shutters. For instance, under the ‘detect blur' setting, the camera delays the shutter until both the subject and the camera itself have stopped moving. In our tests this did circumvent camera-shake to a good degree, though it still can't be said to replace good stabilization, as the auto-shutter often resulted in four to five second pauses before snapping the picture.
Otherwise the EX-S10 offers essentially everything to be expected in a point-and-shoot: the aforementioned auto-shutter with blur, panning, and smile detection, Casio's intelligent face-detection that can even pick-out previously photographed faces, soft and red-eye reduction flashes, and continuous burst-modes with flash support. Better yet, the camera packs image-quality features not expected of a point-and-shoot, namely a 10-megapixel sensor and support for ISO ranging from ISO-50 to 1600.
The EX-S10 also has above-average video recording, including native support for 16:9 aspect-ratios and resolutions up to 848x480, both of which handily surpass the meager requirements of YouTube uploads. Video is recorded to an H.264 stream, audio to a 44.1khz AAC stream at ~90 kbps, and both are muxed into a MOV file, so the potential for quality is quite high.
Interface / Software - Good
Like most of Casio's Exilim products, the EX-S10 is overall intuitive and easy to use. Shooting features are selectable off the main menu, which is itself quickly accessible via the four-way controller. The system menu is accessible via the menu button, and unfortunately it plays upon one of our pet-peeves, in that the camera dumps you out of the menu each time you make a selection, which can make initial setups a chore. Still, excepting that issue, the camera should prove smooth sailing for novice and comfortable shooters alike.
Casio has included a decent storage / printing utility, but unfortunately it has no real editing capabilities to speak of. Thankfully, the bundle also includes Casio's YouTube uploader, which makes sending videos from the camera to a YouTube account a painless one-step process. Otherwise the camera comes with the standards: a USB cable, an A/V cable, and an external charger.
Image quality - Very good
The EX-S10 features a 1/2.3" sensor giving it an ~8% increase in surface area over typical 1/2.5" point-and-shoot sensors. On one hand, this is an appreciable improvement over most compact sensors. On the other hand, considering the EX-S10 is packing 10-megapixels into its images, i.e. 20% more information over the standard 8-megapixels, it needs all the surface area it can get. At best the noise distribution would be as good as an 8-megapixel camera with a smaller sensor.
Noise samples [ISO-50,100,200,400,800,1600]
Thankfully, Casio pulled it off: the EX-S10 has good noise management, even despite its higher pixel-count. ISO-50 is functionally noiseless, noise isn't readily perceivable at full zoom until ISO-200, isn't notable sub-100% zoom until ISO-800, and even at 1600 the noise is tightly packed enough as to not be too distracting. This is better than expected performance and actually makes 10-megapixel sensors a worthy addition to a point-and-shoot market.
Scene test
The EX-S10 performed equally well in this scene test: edges are clean, colors distinct and accurate, and it's overall a pleasing image. Noise is ever so slightly evident in the swath of blue sky, but otherwise this is a great result from a high pixel-density image.
Edge test
The edge-test is similarly excellent: the background sky is a deep, rich blue, and the backlit edges are well-delineated and sharp. Again, there is a minute level of noise in the sky, but hardly enough to complain about.
Macro test
The camera passes this macro test, though not quite with the same flying colors. In light of the 1cm capabilities of other compact cameras, the macro range here is disappointing, and even then the camera only focuses on a small part of the subject. Still, image-quality itself is high, and the focus is decently shallow for a small-form sensor.
Video test
Given its advertised purpose as a ‘YouTube capture mode,' the video quality is phenomenal. There are some compression artifacts, but quality is overall beyond expectations. If anything, Casio may be selling themselves short by association, as the video quality here rivals low-end camcorders.
Price and availability
The Casio Exilim Card EX-S10 is available now for around $250.
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