New Casio Exilim EX-S10 Camera

Well, I've been wanting a new camera for a long time and finally got one. I wanted one that had at least 3x zoom, could record movies, and had other modern features like blur control, but I wanted it so small I would hardly notice it in my pocket. The EX-S10 was designed just for this.

The camera has several rapid-shot modes and this is an absolute must, in my opinion, for a digital camera. That's because the one downside to digital cameras is that the auto-focus, etc. takes some time and then saving the picture (especially very high-resolution pictures) takes a while as well. So you have a delay after pressing the button and another delay before being able to snap another shot.

This camera has a fast-mode, which sets the resolution to only 2Mpx (good enough for 3x5 prints), but fires off shots in rapid succession as long as you hold down the button. So Shannon snapped a good dozen or so shots of me walking up and diving into our pool. Then you can just chose to keep the couple of shots that are the best or you can keep them all to show the whole scene during a slideshow.

There is one thing that is a bit of a pain, which is that it doesn't come with a doc and you can't charge the battery while its in the camera. So you have to take it out and put it in the charger. I guess making this camera the worlds smallest 10 Mpx camera required them to leave out the charging circuitry from the phone itself.

One thing to note about the attached picture is that I'm sure its resolution has been significantly reduced when it was uploaded into this post. I've found the pictures are great on it as long as there is plenty of light or you photographing something close enough to use the flash. In low light, even indoors with the lights on, the pictures appear a bit yellow and grainy. So I guess that's another big downside to digital cameras. Cleaning them up on a computer doesn't help either because a grainy photo just gets worse when you attempt to touch it up.