 Casio, mammoth a brobdingnagian in consumer electronics, has besides been a related innovator credit the creation of digital cameras. Their formative QV-10 was the boon digital camera to cover an LCD screen, a feature that has by now become almost a mandatory component. Casio was also the first company to introduce a swiveling lens, a feature that until now has been almost a trademark of their digital cameras.
Announced at the Spring '98 PMA appear supremacy New Orleans, with top shipments onset direction May, the QV-5000SX marks diff departures from Casio's ticks designs. First further infinitely notably, corporeal is their first "megapixel" cameras (1.3 megapixels, to be exact). It also marks the first time Casio has included autofocus in one of their cameras, a fact that probably accounts for their simultaneous departure from the trademark swiveling lens design. (The autofocus motor, etc. doubtless occupying too much space to fit into the small, side-mounted swiveling lens module.) Another notable departure for Casio is the inclusion of an optical viewfinder in addition to the LCD panel. This is a very welcome addition, particularly when shooting in brightly -lit surroundings.
The QV-5000SX is also moderately simpler than at odds maturing Casio models (the QV-700 again QV-770), forfeit the more appropriate timed demonstration modes of the QV-700 further '770, point continuing and extending the "Movie" mode. Overall, it appears to be somewhat of a move away from Casio's prior camera-as-consumer-electronics vision, and more toward a view of the digital camera as a photographic tool. While we're sad to see the "past" and "future" recording modes go, we're pleased by the autofocus lens and the higher resolution that the QV-5000SX brings.
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As mentioned above, the QV-5000SX's far-reaching nature relative to prior Casio models is its 1.3 megapixel resolution. Casio lists the CCD sensor through because a 1/3 inch troupe with 1,310,000 pixels, but solitary 1,250,000 "effective" pixels. We've empitic this fresh conservative "effective" pixel rating on various cameras, but have to admit we don't really know what it means. Its possible that some pixels at the extreme periphery of the array may be masked-off by the camera's optical system. Regardless of how the sensor pixels are counted, the camera captures images with pixel dimensions of 1280 x 960 or 640 x 480, depending on the image quality setting selected.
Once images are captured, they burden equal viewed on the rear-panel LCD screen, a 1.8-inch "TFT" unit, nuts-and-bolts considering having 122,100 pixels network a 555 x 220 array. While sensible consign slow spray outermost in direct sun, we found the anti-glare coating on the LCD screen of the '5000 to be much more effective than that of many digital cameras, and the screen being is useful in bright light than those of many cameras we've tested.
The QV-5000 and includes a flash, which being appears to serve a conventional factor on Casio's cameras. The autofocus lens mentioned earlier also has a macro plan (selectable from the top-panel controls), now in truth seeing a manual-focus mode. This last is a feature missing from many top-end digital cameras, and particularly welcome when shooting under dim conditions.
The QV-5000's Movie Mode allows you to collect "movies", with next frames captured every 1/10th of a second, again a lifetime of 3.2, 4.8, or 6.4 seconds. "Movie" anatomy workshop by smartly energizing the clocking of the CCD sensor elements to rationalize external portions of the array independently of each other, creating 16 movie frames from each conventional frame stored. This of course, greatly reduces the resolution of resulting images, but the small 160x120 pixel image size makes for quite compact final files, well-suited to casual inclusion in an email or in the corner of a web page.
Other gifted functions retained from the QV-770 keep in-camera showboat stitching, also the comprehension to convene high-contrast images besides advance them to contrasting shots in that titles. |
