Casio Exilim EX-FC100

Movie Mode
The Movie mode on the FC100 is a place where the camera really shines. Oddly, rather than shifting into movie mode via a dial or switch of some sort, the camera has a Film button on the top right of the camera's rear, which will start filming video instantly. It also has a small dial around this button which lets you chose between standard and high-speed modes. In standard, you can shoot 640x480 or 720p. In high speed mode, you can shoot up to 210fps at 480x360 resolution, 420fps at 224x168 and an impressive 1000fps at 224x56. At the highest speed, this is barely a sliver of screen, but it's still damned fast. You will need a really strong light source to get a decent exposure when filming this fast.

Drive / Burst Mode
The other major selling point of this Casio is the way they've squeezed the extreme photography speeds of the much larger EX-F1 and EX-FH20 into a much smaller form factor. To access these ultra-fast modes, you press a button on the top of the camera marked with an icon for 30fps, and from here can chose just how fast you want to shoot. Shutter speeds run from 3 to 30 frames per second, but at reduced 6MP resolution instead of full 9MP. You can also limit the number of photos the camera takes with one press of the button to any number between five and 30.

Casio has taken this ludicrous speed, and instituted a number of features to take advantage of it. Firstly, there's a button on the top of the camera that throws it into Slow Motion mode, which records one, two or three seconds of high-speed photography, plays it back in slow motion, and lets you choose which image you want to keep. Casio also implements a pre-recording scheme, which it combines with this high speed to good effect. You can have the camera continuously pre-record anywhere from 3-30 seconds of video, or pre-record 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 seconds of photography to prevent the delay when you press the shutter button from stopping you getting that perfect shot.

Playback Mode
In Playback mode you can zoom into an image up to 8x, and pull back out to 25 thumbnails. For editing controls, you can rotate, resize, trim, alter the brightness, white balance (even after you've taken the image), or make a motion print (a single image made from combining a series of stills from a video).

Custom Image Presets
On Casio cameras, these are called Best Shot modes (helpfully labeled with a button with the large letters BS), and the FC100 has a good array of them. There's Auto, Portrait, Scenery, Portrait and Scenery, Children, Sports, Pet, Flower, Natural Green, Autumn Leaves, Sundown, High Speed Night Scene, Night Scene Portrait, Fireworks, High Speed Antishake, Multimotion Image (combines areas of different photos of a single object to portray it as being in motion), High Speed Best Selection (takes a slew of pictures and lets you choose the best one), Move Out CS (photographs a target as soon as it moves out of frame), Move In CS (photographs a target as soon as it moves into frame), Prerecord Movie and YouTube