Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

The James Bond spy camera

Frustrated with my current digital camera (a Sony DSC-S70), I followed a link from Scripting News to Ray Ozzie’s weblog, where he sings the praises of the Casio Exilim EX-S1, “the best camera [Ray] ever owned.” As Ray puts it:

The resolution is perfectly fine for on-screen viewing, it has a great flash, it has ample capacity when used with a 128mb memory card, it beats out even the Blackberry in terms of its battery life (weeks), and best of all, it boots and is ready to snap a picture in sub-one-second. Just works, just right. Strongly recommended.

The EX-S1 is a 1-megapixel camera in a stainless steel body that’s about the same dimensions as a credit card and only half an inch thick. It has a fixed focus 5.6mm/F2.5 lens (equivalent to 37mm on 35mm camera).

The size impressed me immediately—one disadvantage of the Sony is that it’s just too big to take with me everywhere. A greater negative, however, is the Sony’s shutter lag, an unfortunate “feature” of most digital cameras. It’s impossible to shoot fluidly with anything but a digital SLR (where the image is deflected by the mirror through the reflex prism to the viewfinder). With a digital camera, the image coming through the lens appears on the LCD screen. When you press the shutter release, the camera finds focus and the shutter closes (the image then freezes on the LCD screen), then the shutter is released. This can take up to a second and a half (less if you prefocus, but if the subject then moves you can’t be sure that you’ve focused accurately).

The fixed focus design of the EX-S1 virtually eliminates shutter lag since there’s no focusing to be done: everything is always in focus from 1 meter to infinity.

I had my doubts about 1-megapixel (the DSC-S70 is a 3-megapixel camera with a tack-sharp Zeiss lens) but I was interested enough to track down some detailed appraisals of the Casio camera—Ray’s weblog post is merely a recommendation from a satisfied owner, not a review that balances the camera’s strong points with its shortcomings.

There are two comprehensive reviews, at Steve’s Digicams and the Digital Camera Resource Page. Both are generally enthusiastic: about the camera’s tiny size, its acceptable (not great) image quality, and range of manual functions. But, taken together, they reveal a number of problems:

• there is no easy way to turn the LCD screen on and off
• the 4-way selector switch on the back is too small to be operated easily with a finger tip
• the power button and the shutter release are so close together that it’s easy to turn the camera off when you try to take a picture.

This could be a perfect example of the old adage: Don’t buy the first model of anything, wait until they get it right the second time around.

Nevertheless, I remain interested: the tiny size and no shutter lag make it an ideal point-and-shoot camera while the 1-megapixel (960x1280) image is more than sufficient for web display, as Jeff’s image gallery proves (Steve, inexplicably, took most of his gallery pictures at the interpolated 1200x1600 resolution, so that most of them look soft). I’ll check one out the next time I’m near a camera store. Despite my misgivings, I may succumb to its obvious appeal.

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