Next thing you know, digital cameras will be making the ice cream of your choice and vacuum your living room floor. Or so it seems with Casio’s EX-S770 Card RD, another development in their Exilim line. This newcomer can work as a guidebook, to hold maps and tourist attraction information. It can even help you sell stuff on eBay.
And it can take pictures on top of it all.
The Casio Exilim EX-S770
Card RD is made of stainless steel for the utmost durability, while still maintaining its slim profile. You can choose from three colors including red, blue and silver. It has a 7.2 mega pixel image-capture capacity, three-times optical zoom and four-times digital zoom (for a total of twelve-times total zoom). The LCD is huge at 2.8 inches with a new feature called wide-screen format. This is relatively new to digital cameras, and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio for images and movies displayed on HD TV.
The Exilim boasts several other new features including Anti Shake DSP, great for reducing photo blur due to shaky hands or moving subjects. The Data Storage Function allows you to transfer data to the camera for reference and viewing. This is handy for uploading maps, business documents, and pictures. They are converted for optimal viewing on the LCD screen. This eliminates the need to carry large and cumbersome guidebooks or maps. The Casio Exilim EX-S770 can record movies in wide-screen MPEG-4 format with monaural audio. There is also a feature called Best Shot, used to quickly setup the camera for the type of scene to be captured. There are 35 different settings such as for day, night, sunny, eBay, movie, document, and even a whiteboard. The eBay Best Shot mode is designed for taking photos of items to sell on eBay. Photos are optimized for uploading to eBay, allowing the photographer to focus on items such as jewelry and items with intricate detail.
The camera has a very bright and colorful TFT LCD screen. The batteries
are rechargeable Lithium Ion. They will provide ample power for years to come. The manufacturer claims the battery charge capacity to be about 2,000 still images, or 1.5 hours of continuous movie recording, provided there is sufficient memory storage. The accessories include a strap, AV cable, AC adapter, and software for data transfer and photo editing. Last but not least is a USB cradle, definitely a nice feature for easy PC transfers. It charges the battery, too. The camera’s onboard memory is only 6Mb, which means that for additional memory capacity you’ll need to invest in either a SHDC, SD or MMC memory card. As far as buttons and controls go – pretty standard stuff. Still, the navigation wheel is quite small, making it difficult to select forward and back options in the menus.
Oddly enough, the bundled software for transferring data from the PC to the camera is available for computers using Windows 98 – XP and Mac OSX (10.2.8 or later). On the other hand, one caveat for Mac users is that the Photo Transport software feature can not be used to upload images to the camera.
- Manufacturer: Casio Computer Co. Ltd.
- Price: $379 US (Estimated $349.99 US on Casio web page)
- More info: www.casiousa.com and exilim.casio.com
- Rating: 4/5
- Reviewer’s notes: Not a toy, despite its many bells and whistles. Also good to know: camera weighs in at 4.5 ounces (w/o battery) and is a tad over 1/2 an inch deep. Especially nice: the eBay feature and the wide-screen recording. Needs more built-in memory.
