So who would ever need to take so many pictures in one second? Sports fans, of course; imagine having the luxury of plucking out a photo of exactly the bat angle, soccer-leg swing or basketball jump height you want.
But there are many other times when you might like to isolate just the right split second: when your subjects are wildlife (including children), explosions, splashes, bouquet tosses, celebrity glimpses, broadening smiles and so on.
The F1’s second trick is that business about photographing a moment after the fact. In pre-record mode, you half-press the shutter button when you’re awaiting an event that’s unpredictable: a breaching whale, a geyser’s eruption or a 5-year-old batter connecting with the ball. The camera silently, repeatedly records 60 shots a second, immediately discarding the old to make room for the new.
When you finally press the shutter button fully, the camera simply preserves the most recent shots, thus effectively photographing an event that, technically speaking, you missed.
Then there’s the motion detector. In this mode, you put the camera down on something steady, press the shutter button and back away. It sits there, waiting for hours if necessary, until it detects movement in the scene—at which point it auto-fires 60 burst shots. That could come in handy when you’re trying to photograph a hummingbird approaching a flower, a bird arriving at its nest or an unauthorized household member raiding the cookie jar.
As a final time trick, the F1 can display, on its 2.8-inch screen, a slow-motion version of what the camera is “seeing”. Your preview falls further and further behind real time—but you now have the luxury of patience as you decide precisely when to snap the shot.
The F1’s movie mode is one of the most powerful ever. It has stereo microphones, and even a jack for an external mike. It has separate triggers for stills and videos, so you can snap stills right in the middle of filming a movie. It can zoom in midmovie, a rarity in still cameras. And it can film in either standard or high definition; there’s even a mini-HDMI jack for connecting the camera straight to an HDTV set.
Most stunning of all, this camera can film at outrageously high frame rates: 300, 600, or even 1,200 frames a second. The result is incredibly smooth, extremely slow motion, like something in an Imax nature movie. No still camera has ever offered anything like this feature.
The downside, alas, is that at faster rates, you get smaller movies. At 1,200 frames a second, you’re dealing with a Triscuit-sized video in the centre of your TV screen, surrounded by oceans of black margin.
Still, when you’re trying to pinpoint problems with your golf swing, your tennis serve or your industrial equipment, slowing time down to this extent is like a keyhole into a previously invisible world. You might not care about the size of the keyhole.
Unfortunately, this highly unusual, almost experimental piece of equipment includes nearly as many downsides as breakthroughs.
First, even though it’s nearly as big and bulky as a digital SLR like a Canon Rebel or Nikon D80, the F1 is, at its heart, an amateur camera. It contains a tiny light sensor (about half an inch diagonal, versus 1.1 inches in a beginner SLR). As a result, its light sensitivity is poor. Except in bright sunlight or studio lighting, those burst-mode shots are often disappointingly dim or disappointingly blurry.
Casio was obviously aware of this weakness, and so it engineered one of the brightest and fastest flashes ever on a consumer camera: it can fire an amazing 7 times a second for up to 3 seconds. That superflash generally solves the light-sensitivity problem.
But there are other problems. The eyepiece viewfinder is electronic (a tiny, relatively coarse video screen), not optical (pristine, see-through glass). Start-up is slow. The 12X zoom is nice to have, but it’s slow to react. And during video capture, when you turn the lens ring to zoom, it jerks spastically through the zoom range, effectively ruining your shot. The camera has great difficulty changing focus during filming, too.
-DAVID POGUE (New York Times)
