Well, I finally did it! I bought the Casio for 2 main reasons:
a) 3 megapixels resolution
b) bundled with IBM 370 MBytes microdrive for storage
This leaves open the question of battery life - I bought a charger and 3 sets of NiMH cells.
I have not had as much time as I would like to play with the camera - but have checked out the exposure with a favorite subject, flowers. As I expected, there is an overexposure problem - more on this and how to compensate here.
I had some reservations with the auto focus in some of my first shots - I have now done a test of focus and resolution.
This really worried me, since the equivalent film speed rating is ASA100, and images could be expected to be noisy if the ASA setting is increased. I have done one experiment of pointing the camera at the street (in night scene mode with flash off), and was pleasantly surprised at how well it did under the street lamp. I will be doing more low light tests as time goes by, but I am now not so concerned.
The first photo is a downsampled 640x480 version of the complete frame, and the second is a cropped portion of the full-size image. Note that the focus doesn't look perfect, but I am not sure that the camera thought it was okay either.
Click on either small thumbnail to see the full size images
I have tried just about all the features on the camera once, just to see if they are working - will do more thorough investigation and report results here later. Of special interest is the panorama feature - I intend to compare it to taking separate photos and combining them with stitching software.
Links to digital camera resources
[Last updated 28 May 2000]