By now I am quite familiar with what to look for in a digital camera. Therefore when I tried out the Casio EXILIM S10, I wasted little time in looking for the features one would expect and want in a digital camera. This is my review on the camera.
The EXILIM series of digital cameras by Casio, as its name says, are meant to be compact. True to its name, the S10 is extremely small and compact. At a mere 94mm x 55mm x 15mm, it is one of the thinnest cameras I have ever seen, and I am not exaggerating even a little. The camera was so small that it fit easily into my pocket without causing a bulge. On top of that, the camera weighs only 113 grams. In my opinion, that is the ideal weight any digital camera should have. Not too light as to go unnoticed and not too heavy to cause any inconvenience.
The S10 takes pictures of up to 10.1 megapixels. That is more than the average resolution of digital cameras in the market nowadays. The pictures taken are clear, detailed and colorful. It also has a 3x optical zoom and 4x digital zoom value. 3x digital zoom is way too little for a camera such as this. 5x would have been just nice. There is a slight occurrence of image noise when the pictures are digitally zoomed or when pictures are taken at night.
Next, we come to the camera’s video taking capabilities. The videos taken are clear and colorful. However, it is a little too large and memory is taken up too quickly. There also appears to be a little bit of lagging when video is taken. In one video, the sound and the images in the video were not in proper timing, so to speak. It happened only once but this is something I felt must be mentioned. Other than that, the audio/video quality itself was good.
Here some are other things about the camera that I think should be mentioned. The camera comes with 12MB of internal memory, which is never enough. The memory can be expanded with SD or MMC cards. The battery life of this camera is above average, which is good. I could take a few hundred pictures before having to charge the camera. The red eye reduction function works perfectly fine and never did I red a picture that has red eyes in it. Lastly, the camera does not have a proper image stabilization function. Therefore, if you have shaky hands, try not to zoom and take pictures because the pictures will definitely turn out blur.
This is a good camera actually. Too bad it is lacking some important features that would make this camera great.