Casio Exilim EX-H15 review

Video is recorded at 720p at 30fps in the Motion JPEG format at a bit rate of 30Mbps, but quality isn’t that great. It struggles a bit with panning and it’s quite noisy, but it’s passable. The soundtrack is recorded by a single mono microphone at a bit rate of 177kbps, which again isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s good enough for its intended use. Both focusing and zoom controls are disabled, which is probably for the better as they’re both quite noisy in operation.

Operational speed was very impressive for a camera of this class, turning on in under two seconds. Shot-to-shot time was about a second in the standard auto mode, but increased to a few seconds when using one of the scene modes, art filters or the Premium Auto mode as there’s some extra processing after the shot has been recorded. We can’t heap quite as much praise on the HS mode though, as it’s a bit of a gimmick. It records at either 10fps at 1,280×960 or 4fps at 1,600×1,200, but picture quality is quite poor with an overall soft feel and a lack of detail.

Given the extreme focal range, Casio has been wise to kit the EX-H15 out with image stabilisation of the sensor-shift variety, which moves the sensor to compensate for vibrations that become more of a problem at longer focal lengths. We found it worked quite well, but even in good lighting conditions there were still shots that suffered from camera shake.

Otherwise, the EX-H15 produces bright and well-saturated photos in good light, but there’s a loss of sharpness in the corners at the two extreme ends of the H15’s focal range. At wider angles barrel distortion is also quite extreme, giving you something else to consider, but photos taken between about 40mm and 200mm (equivalent) don’t exhibit many problems. Sharpness across the frame isn’t bad, although we found that the bottom left hand corner was a little softer than the rest of the frame at all focal lengths.

We also saw all the typical characteristics of a 14 megapixel 1/2.3in CCD sensor, meaning pixel fringing was visible at 100 per cent zoom and low light performance is not surprisingly a weak point. Despite this, Casio has done a reasonable job with its noise reduction algorithm and the EX-H15 produces acceptable images at up to ISO 400, with detail and sharpness starting to suffer at ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 border on unusable as resolution loss caused by noise reduction is quite harsh – at ISO 3200, edge definition is almost completely lost and there’s not only colour shifting, but also a lot of banding.

Despite these quibbles, there’s a lot to like about the EX-H15’s practicality and it serves its purpose well. Both still and motion picture quality is quite good, and the lens isn’t bad either – you can take pretty good photos with the minimum of fuss. What makes the EX-H15 stand out though is the very long battery life which makes it the perfect camera for taking on holiday if you’re travelling light. It’s similarly priced against its competitors and may not be quite as attractive as the TZ10 or WB650, which both have a built-in GPS unit, but it’s otherwise a very capable camera.