Back in the 2000's Casio was well known for making innovative pocket digital cameras. While Casio never made a DSLR or ICL Mirrorless camera, Casio Digital cameras were well known and popular for simple no-nonsense pocket cameras and a few high end, high speed bridge cameras.
Casio made several innovations well before their time including a camera with a global shutter that could shoot up to 60fps at full resolution which was something that wouldn't be offered by other manufacturers till over a decade later. They also pioneered in-body charging using a custom docking station years before USB charging would make an appearance on compact cameras.
I only own one Casio digital camera, as they are fairly hard to come by. The brand is often sought out for by collectors for their unique properties. I don't own one of the high-speed cameras but mine does support charging via the docking station which I also own as you can see from the photos below:
On the surface the Exilim Z850 is nothing special. Released in 2006 it has a more premium 8.1mp 1/1.8" CCD sensor though it's ISO performance is limited to ISO 400 in spite of having a larger-then-normal sized sensor.
It has very basic controls and can be operated in "Aperture Priority" mode with only two selections per focal length: Aperture wide open or stopped down one full stop. That was it. So for example at full wide zoom you had a choice between F2.8 or F4, and no other options.
It also has a max shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second and lacks a built in ND filter so there are times when outdoor lighting will exceed the exposure of F4 at 1/1000 of a second ISO 50. I ran into this mid-day shooting it during late spring last year which meant that in extremely bright situations this camera is just as bad of a choice as it is for low light conditions.
If put into Auto ISO mode the camera will only choose 50, 100 or 200. To shoot at ISO 400 you need to manually select it from the main menu; there is no quick menu or shortcut to change this setting. Changing the Exposure comp is a quick menu function, so it is pretty easy to adjust for the camera underexposing or overexposing, a feature that is often buried under a menu or several button presses in other point and shoot cameras of this age.
This is another "I like this more then I should" camera. It has a nice metal brushed body, and very responsive buttons. Tacitly it feels premium even with the limits of the camera's aperture control, lack of RAW support and a fairly meh/ standard 3x optical zoom.
The reason I like this camera is for the Sensor and the clean "Film like" look it gets. Provided you don't have too little or too much light it takes really crisp vibrant shots with a similar look to the XZ-1 just a lot more limited to what it can do.
The ISO may not extend past 400 but there is very little noise at 400 so Casio likely put this limit in so you got clean, quality and consistent looking photos regardless of what ISO the camera was set to.
For those who are looking for a Digital Pocket camera that mirrors the limits and look of a Film point and shoot- this camera is one of your better options.
The drabness of this long winter we've been having doesn't do justice for how clean and vibrant this sensor is. For the samples gallery I'm going to include two photos I took during my week of shooting with it for the challenge, and two photos I took last year.
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