Casio EX-S10

COMING FOURTH IN our rankings, right after the least expensive camera in the comparison is the Casio ESX10, the most expensive camera in this round up. The reason behind the inflated price tag of Rs.18,995 is that this is the world's slimmest 10MP camera. The ESX10 is the only 10MP camera in the shoot-out and packs a nice little surprise. It offers you manual focus, something that is not seen in other cameras in this category. This is especially useful when photographing subjects that are close say, about a meter or less.

Our test shots results were well above par and the overall image quality was amongst the best here, except in low light shooting. In our indoor test shots, the ESX10 produced excellent details (like pins on a motherboard, text on labels, etc), and color reproduction was good as well with no visible saturation issues. The only disappointment was with high ISO performances. Even at ISO 400, the noise levels were a tad higher even for this segment of cameras. ISO 1600 was nearly unusable.

The company boasts of a YouTube video mode and an auto shutter. The former shoots videos that can be easily uploaded to the YouTube (read: lower resolution and bitrate) and the latter releases the shutter automatically once the camera detects that the subject is still to avoid blurs caused due to movements by the subject. A downside to video shooting is that it uses the .mov format which is not as flexible for editing as the .avi format is.
If you can live with noisy images in low light (especially when taken without flash) and can afford its price tag, this will make for a very good pocketable camera. The only missing feature is that of image stabilization in the 3x optical zoom lens. The navigation feature could have been improved though as finding scene modes can take a bit of looking around if you have not used this camera earlier.

Posted in: Casio