Casio Exlim EX-FH20 Camera Review

Casio Exilim EX-FH20 Camera Review Andi Barness: Hello and welcome to neo-fight.tv—you always do that—the technology for the not so geeky. My name is Andi Barness. Ben Freedman: And I’m Ben Freedman and I do always do that. I don’t know why. It’s my little dance. It’s my little pre-show dance. Andi Barness: Getting you ready. Ben Freedman: Exactly. Today in the show, we’re looking at a couple of different cameras and the first one is of this guy right here by Casio, and how would you pronounce the name of that camera? Andi Barness: Looks like it’s the Exilim. Ben Freedman: Exilim, is that kind of like excellent? Andi Barness: Exilim, yeah. Ben Freedman: Exilim. Andi Barness: We’ll see if this camera is excellent, this Exilim. Ben Freedman: Exilim camera. Now, one thing that Casio—the marketing department of Casio has got some issues. This is the Exilim EX-FH20 Andi Barness: EX-FH20. Ben Freedman: And they have several different Exilims, so you got to remember if you’re asking for a camera, this is the EX-FH—why can't it be like the Exilim 100 or something like that? Why does it have to be the EX-FH20 camera? And this is kind of like a mid-sized camera. It’s not really a point and shoot. It’s not really an SLR with the changing lenses. Go ahead, pick it up. Show the good folks. What do you think of the size, the weight, the bulk? Andi Barness: You know, it’s definitely heavier than the Sony Cybershot but it does some really cool things. Ben Freedman: This is not a pocket camera. Andi Barness: Definitely. This is where you need a nice bag. Ben Freedman: A nice bag, definitely, like last week’s show. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: Now, let me show you a couple of features about the camera. First of all— Andi Barness: I’ve already checked the camera, just so you know. Ben Freedman: Okay, alright. Andi Barness: Wait, real quick, this—not liking this. Ben Freedman: Why don’t you like it? Andi Barness: Well, obviously it works but I’m going to lose this. I’m going to set this down somewhere and then I’m going to go to final lens cap but I’m not going to have it. Ben Freedman: And a lot of the cameras these days have the automatic lens cap. Andi Barness: Right, or even the string where it just sort of dangles here. Ben Freedman: Well, it comes with a string. I just didn’t put the string on. Andi Barness: Oh! I tested it out without a string. Ben Freedman: No string, but the problem is I do like the ones better that have the little door. Andi Barness: Exactly. Ben Freedman: But you can put a string on here. See the little hole? The string will dangle off there. Andi Barness: What color is my hair? Ben Freedman: Really? I’m not sure, okay. So this thing takes great pictures and great video. In fact, its claim to fame is kind of the video on there in that it will take really fast video shots. Most video is at 30 frames per second. This will take up to a thousand frames per second but the faster you go, the smaller the megapixels. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: So if you’re at a thousand, you get the tiny little postage stamp size. People say, “Why would you want to take pictures really fast?” ndi Barness: That’s what I’m thinking. Ben Freedman: Right. So let me show you on here some video that I took at 200 frames per second. We’ll put it up on the screen while we’re watching it. This is 200 frames per second. You’ll notice this is not high def, it’s like smaller but you’ll notice how smooth the slow motion is. So let’s watch this together. Andi Barness: What are we looking at by the way? Ben Freedman: This is my daughter’s birthday party. Andi Barness: Alright. See, I like that. I mean this is obviously stuff that my Sony Cybershot doesn’t do so— Ben Freedman: No, most cameras do not do that. So if you’re like taking—if you have a kid who’s into baseball or something, it also by the way has a pre-record buffer. So if he’s into baseball and you’re waiting for him to hit, you hold the button down halfway and it records like a loop until you press it and then it captures like the two seconds before that. Andi Barness: Do you know how many pictures that I have taken of my son up at bat and I always get the very end because there’s always a delay on it. Ben Freedman: Right. This will record prior to that. Andi Barness: I love that. Ben Freedman: Pictures and video. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: Now, let me do this. So that’s a great thing, this really super slow motion video. Let me go ahead and take a picture. Now, what issue that this camera has is that it’s either got a super easy mode or it’s really hard to figure out how to make all those high speed stuff. So there’s a bit of a learning curve for that. But if you do need the super easy mode, once again, the Casio marketing people have come up with the worst name button. They have a BS button. The BS button is how you get into super easy mode. BS actually stands for— Andi Barness: I was going to say what does it stands for. Ben Freedman: Best shot. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: What you do is you press this button and you notice it has little pictures and all you do is in best shot mode, all you do is you zoom in on this—all you do is you pick the picture that looks like what you want to take. So if you want to take a portrait, you do the first one. If you want to take scenery, it’s that one. Andi Barness: So if you’re more of a visual person like I am, that’s great. Ben Freedman: You just say, how my picture looks like? I want to take a picture of my dog. Look, here’s a dog picture you put the dog on there. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: Oh, I’m taking a picture of a sunset. Okay, you put the sunset one on there. You want to take a picture of kids playing sports. Andi Barness: A close up, perfect. Ben Freedman: So I’m going to go over here and pick the portrait, right there and—by the way, you pop the flash up here with the little button. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: There’s the flash and I will take your picture. Andi Barness: Okay, we’ll see how fast it goes. Ben Freedman: Okay, ready? 1, 2, 3, that’s a beautiful picture. Andi Barness: Thank you. Ben Freedman: Looks great. Andi Barness: Because you hit portrait. Ben Freedman: Because I was in portrait mode. Had I been in kids mode, it would make you look a lot younger. Andi Barness: Oh, I like that one. Who wouldn’t like that? Ben Freedman: Wouldn’t that be great? It would be awesome. Tell me your other thoughts about the camera. Andi Barness: You know, I’m really liking this because you said there’s a lot of things like some of these buttons up here. They’re pretty high tech and you really have to know, so you just ignore those. Ben Freedman: Yeah, you could ignore that stuff. You know what I’m going to— Andi Barness: Oh, wait a second, what about—does it charges? How is it, batteries? Ben Freedman: Right, so another issue with the camera is that it’s—let me pop this open here—it takes regular AA batteries. Andi Barness: Yeah, I didn’t look at that. Ben Freedman: Right, so— Andi Barness: How many cameras do that? You never say that anymore. Ben Freedman: Well, especially not in a $400.00 plus camera. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: Usually they don’t take the AA like the Duracell going on in here. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: Usually it has a rechargeable but not this camera. Andi Barness: I would be okay with that as long as it lasted a long time. Ben Freedman: I haven’t run out of them yet but I also haven’t been taking a lot of pictures. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: By the way, I’d like to show off what the high def video looks like on here. The other great thing about this camera, huge zoom, 20 times zoom. Andi Barness: Wow. Ben Freedman: So you can really zoom in. Let me go on here and I’m going to turn the power on here. So for instance, I’m going to point this and we’ll start taking a little video here. Andi Barness: You need to clean your— Ben Freedman: I do need to clean that, yeah. But if I take this, here I am recording video now and I can actually zoom in—really far, 20 times zoom. Now, I’m out of focus there just because I didn’t focus on it properly. Let me turn around here and get a little video of you. Andi Barness: Don’t zoom, hi! Ben Freedman: I won’t zoom, yeah. If we zoom in— Andi Barness: Don’t zoom. Ben Freedman: Okay, no zooming. Andi Barness: Please, no zooming. Ben Freedman: Zooming is bad. So this is 720p mode. It’s a pretty high quality video. Again, you can't do this when you’re in the slow motion mode. That takes much smaller video. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: But again, I can go into a regular photo mode here. I’m going to do the same thing here, so I’m going to take a picture. This is a far away picture of a box. Open the flash, there it is. Here is a far away picture of the box and then I’m going to zoom in now— Andi Barness: That’s pretty close. Ben Freedman: Yeah, that’s 20 times zoom right there. Andi Barness: Okay. Ben Freedman: See if it will actually focus. Andi Barness: See, now $400.00 to me doesn’t seem like that much when you’re adding the video to it. Ben Freedman: You think so? Andi Barness: Yeah. I mean my video camera was stolen. I know I told you that but having to get a new video camera, having to get a new camera and then you combine something like this— Ben Freedman: And this one really will do both pretty well. It’s a pretty good combination, so you can do a video, a 720p video and the zoom is amazing, 20 times zoom is incredible, slow motion is great. I just have a problem with that learning curve. It’s kind of a tricky camera to learn. If you don’t take the time to learn it, you’re going to miss a lot of cool features. Andi Barness: Right. So you use the basics? Ben Freedman: You can use the BS mode. Andi Barness: Exactly, and then learn as you go along. I don’t know what that’s like. Ben Freedman: So that is the Casio Exilim. I found it on Amazon for about $450.00. Andi Barness: I think it’s worth it. Ben Freedman: There you go. Andi Barness: There you go. Ben Freedman: So we have another review coming up right after this. It’s the Exilim EX-FH20 camera and we’ll be right back with another product, so please— Andi Barness: Stay tuned, watch this. Stay tuned. Ben Freedman: And we’re back and in the second spotlight today, we’re going to be looking at this little camera which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from the Casio. This is by a company called Genius. We’ve reviewed some of their tablets before, touch screen tablets to make a variety of different products. This is the Genius G-Shot HD520 and it’s an HD video camera and takes I think 5 megapixel photos as well but it’s the whole other end. For all of that, it’s $180.00 for a high definition video camera that records to the SD card. Andi Barness: So, should I like it because it’s $180.00? Ben Freedman Well, it’s $180.00 so if you don’t have $450.00 to spend on the big boy— Andi Barness: The big daddy, okay. Ben Freedman: …you got this guy. Now, let me show you again. It opens up. It’s kind of like a pistol grip mode here. It’s got the screen on here, not a bad little screen. Andi Barness: Not bad. Ben Freedman: Yeah, and you go in here and you can take photos and record some video. I’m going to record some video with it. It’s a video camera first, so let me hit a button here and—here we are now recording a high definition video. Andi Barness: Now, come on, zoom in. Ben Freedman: You know that—you’re bringing up stuff already that you know what is the problem. Why don’t you tell the good people what the problem is? Andi Barness: Well, the reason I didn’t like this is because when you zoom, you sort of lose the quality and you get more pixels. Ben Freedman: That’s right. It doesn’t have an optical zoom. It doesn’t have—I’m going to stop recording, okay? Andi Barness: Thank you. Ben Freedman: This doesn’t have an optical zoom like most cameras do. You can zoom in a couple of times but when you do zoom in, it gets pixelated because it’s doing like a crop zoom. Andi Barness: Right. And these are like holding your memories. If you’re like me, this is your family and your kids and your birthday parties and you’re going to want to look back at it and have it look good. So really, I don’t care if it’s $180.00 or if it’s $99.00. If it’s $400.00 and it’s not great quality, then why would you want it? Ben Freedman: Right. I'm going to take a picture. Sorry, I took that on one. Andi Barness: It does have an automatic flash. Ben Freedman: Did you notice the flash there? Alright, well you weren’t quite ready for that, but that’s okay. So tell me what you think. Andi Barness: You know what, obviously I’ve looked at this already and it’s a little light. And sometimes when it’s too light, it feels cheap and it feels plasticky. I want something—especially after that last— Ben Freedman: The last one was—yes, substantial. Andi Barness: It’s sturdy. I mean it was a solid camera. Ben Freedman: This one is a little—it’s a bit plasticky and such, so I agree with you on there, but I have to come back to the fact that high definition video and photos for $180.00. I don’t know that you’re going to get that much cheaper. Andi Barness: Right. Now, the last one, I had a problem with the lens cap. This one doesn’t have a lens cap, it doesn’t have anything, so this could be scratched. So if you spend $180.00, it could be scratched tomorrow and then— Ben Freedman: Yes, it’s true. Again, there is no lens cap on this one at all. Andi Barness: Right. Ben Freedman: So you put a bit if duct tape over the top of it or something. Andi Barness: I guess you could. Ben Freedman: Except then you get all the— Andi Barness: Exactly, you could. Ben Freedman: That wouldn’t be good. So, that’s an issue. Now, let me tell you, it does have a few cool features. Andi Barness: Goofy features. Ben Freedman: You don’t like the cool features? I call them cool features. Andi Barness: I mean one or two might be good but I think they could have put their time—I’m sorry, I’m really—they could have put their time and effort into a lens cap, make it a little more solid, a helping with the zoom, but go ahead. I’m sorry. Ben Freedman: So, let me explain, get a word in here. There is—actually, you can put this on a little tripod. It has motion detection. So for instance, let’s say you set this up in your hotel room. You could put it in the corner, put it in a hotel room and it won’t record until the maid comes in to clean. Andi Barness: And steals it, not that they all steal it but— Ben Freedman: You’re going to get a letter now from the Maids of America, but you know— Andi Barness: It has happened to me. Ben Freedman: You’re right, so if they stole it, that wouldn’t help. But you could tell if the maid came and— Andi Barness: Was going through your jewelry box. Ben Freedman: Was going through your jewelry box. You would have that captured and instead of recording all day, it would just record when there’s motion, so you could do that as well. Andi Barness: Let me just rephrase, not just maid or—you know, anyone steals your camera. I don’t want—I’m going to get a letter like you’re getting a letter on the last one. Ben Freedman: It also works as a media player. You can put movies on this on your card and then give it to your kid. This will fall back like this and your kid can watch videos on the plane or whatever. Andi Barness: See, this is almost something that you would give to your kid just so that they can play with it and have fun with it and— Ben Freedman: Yeah, it will actually be a good—although does the cheapness of it lead it to being broken more by kids, I don’t know. But it is also a voice recorder, so if you want to take notes, you can take notes. Andi Barness: I do like that it’s handy. Ben Freedman: It’s much smaller than the other one and it’s $180.00. I got to tell you, I love the price. The price does it for me. Andi Barness: I don’t think it gets the job done, but that’s just me. Ben Freedman: So that is the Genius G-Shot HD520. I personally like this one. Andi, not so hot on there but I think for the price, $180.00, it is a fantastic deal. But if you’ve got the bucks, maybe you want the Casio Exilim EX-FH20 for 450. Andi Barness: They need to work on that name. Ben Freedman: That’s all the time we have for the show this week but drop us a comment. Do you prefer the expensive high class one that Andi likes or do you like the cheap economical one that’s much cheaper and lets you afford that next vacation that you want to take photos on. Andi Barness: We’d love to know what you think. Ben Freedman: Drop us a comment at www.neo-fight.tv. See, now you’re doing it to me right there, and let us know what you think. We’d love to read those comments. And if you have an extra 30 seconds, take a look at this. Andy Walker: Hey, I’m Andy Walker. I just bought a new computer with Windows Vista on it or maybe you’ve got an old XP computer that you’ve upgraded. But we’ve just created an amazing new DVD that will teach you everything you need to know about the new operating system from Microsoft. It’s called Getting Started with Windows Vista. In this DVD, there are three sections. One is out of the box, what do you need to do as you soon as you start up Vista. Number two is Vista Essentials; things you need to know everyday to make your computer experience amazing—anti-virus, security, all kinds of new features that Vista offers. And finally, deep tips and tricks, things you need to know that nobody else would have told you to make you a Vista Guru. For more information, check out our website at www.gettingstartedvideo.com.