A SHOT YOU CAN'T MISS

The Exilim EX-F1 is not a time machine in the H.G. Wells sense. You can’t climb inside and travel back to high school and undo every humiliating mistake you’ve ever made. But for a digital camera, the F1 comes pretty close. It lets you freeze time, slow time down and even capture photos of sudden events that you’ve already missed.

How is this possible? Because, for starters, the F1 is the world’s fastest camera. A typical shirt-pocket camera, if you’re lucky, can snap one photo a second in “burst mode.” A semipro model will get you 3 shots a second. But this Casio can snap—are you ready for this?—60 photos a second. These are not movies; these are full six-megapixel photographs, each with enough resolution for a poster-size print.

After such a burst, you’re offered three options: delete all 60 shots, keep all 60, or review them and pluck out the individual frames worth keeping. The whole batch begins to play like a flip-book movie; you control playback with a back-panel control dial. As you watch, you press the shutter button once to identify each frame you want to keep; the rest will be discarded.

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...