Photos: Hands-on the Casio Exilim EX-FH20

By Rich Trenholm on 10 November 2008, 12:53pm

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"I feel the need... the need for speed." Step this way, Mr Maverick sir, we've got the Casio Exilim EX-FH20 in the house. It's a speed demon that outpaces almost everything else in the camera market.

The FH20's predecessor, the EX-F1, got us excited with its gobsmackingly fast speed, but proved to be a gimmicky one-trick pony, a proof of concept rather than a fully rounded camera. Casio has set out to address that with the FH20, which drops the headspinning speed to merely dizzying, and makes a number of adjustments that make it more viable as an everyday snapper.

One of the criticisms of the F1 was that it packed a mere 6 megapixels, half as much as many compacts these days. The FH20 has gone to 9 megapixels, with the trade-off being a slight drop in its still-impressive speed.

How fast is it? This camera is systematic, hydromatic, ultramatic -- why, it's greased lightning! Forty stills are captured in one second, and at full 9-megapixel resolution to boot. To capture movement over a longer period, the frame rate can be varied between 1 and 40fps.

Video is pretty impressive, too. It shoots high-definition 1,280x720-pixel video at a frame rate of 30fps, or ramps up to 200, 400, 800 or even 1,000fps. We're talking Road Runner, my friend. Click through the photos for more on the EX-FH20, including more headspinning speed. Meep meep!