Casio F1

Nerdboy's Ultimate Camera!

But also a serious scientific recording tool for many a field researcher and sportsman.

Check out the picture at the bottom of this review, see the golf ball being struck? See the temporary deformation of the said golf ball? Previously you cannot photograph such images without a camera costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now thanks to Casio, anybody with about a grand can.

Not only the fact that the Casio F1 permits 1200fps (frames per second) recording, but it also allows 1/40,000th of a second shutter speed, freezing the golf ball in the midst of a high-speed flight.

And this 1200fps, 1/40,000th second shutter speed feature, is just one of many miraculous abilities of this amazing camera.

Now it is true, that at 1200fps, it records picture of only 336x96 pixels, not quite sufficient for full-frame video, much less photos, of today. However if you take the frame rate down to 300fps, still 10 times faster than a regular video camera, the resolution goes up to 512x384, pretty close to the DVD resolution.

Imagine following side-by-side a marathon runner on the back of a bike or in a car, filming him at 300fps? Beautiful, beautiful slow-motion running is what you get when you play back the footage at regular speed. And just beautfy, but a Marathon coach can actually study all the mechanics of the runner's each step, and do appropriate corrections. Same for baseball, golf swing, QB toss, etc.

Imagine a scientist in the field, studying the flight mechanics of a humming bird, or the sprint of a leopard.

But what does this camera do for the everyday Joe? Well, it also has a "ultimate sport video camera" mode. Say for example, you were shooting your kid playing baseball from the breachers. With the camera on a small monopod, and he is about to bat. The camera has been recording at 30fps, the normal video speed, but as he start to swing his bat, you hit a button which switches the recording speed from 30fps to 300fps on-the-fly, and at the end of his swing, you switch it back to 30fps.

When you get home and hook the camera up directly to the TV, the swing portion will be played back at 30fps just like the others, and everyone get to see his swing at 10x slow motion, and the rest at regular speed. In fact, the 300fps records the swing in such vivid and accurate freezing detail, you could perhaps take the camera down to the umpire, and show him there and then that the ball was outside the box! Casio called this video mode the "30-300fps" mode.

[to be continue...]

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