Casio Exilim EX-FH20 Digital Camera Review - Casio Point and Shoot

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Viewfinder (6.50)
The Casio Exilim EX-FH20 uses an electronic viewfinder rather than an optical one; while not quite as clear as an optical viewfinder, it's the only way to adequately display the ultra-zoom range. The viewfinder screen is 0.2" with an equivalent pixel count of 201,600 dots. We would have liked to see a sensor which would automatically switch the display between the viewfinder and the LCD, as seen on the Panasonic Lumix G1 and Nikon D60. Presently you have to press a button instead, which is clumsy. The viewfinder can be set to three levels of brightness through the menu system.

The viewfinder lacks a proximity sensor

LCD Screen (4.50)
The LCD is a solid, if unimpressive, 3-inch 230,400-pixel affair. This is about on par with the resolution of most LCDs on the market. The screen does seem to resist solarization at just about every angle. It can be set to three levels of brightness, or Auto 1 and Auto 2, both of which use the camera to detect light levels, and adjust screen brightness accordingly; Auto 2 just does so much faster.

The LCD seemed adequate, if uninspired

Hitting the display button while shooting alters the amount of information shown on the screen. It can show nothing bar the focus mark; settings information; or settings information with a brightness histogram that has RGB overlays. During playback you can change from no information to date, time and picture number and finally full shooting information including histogram.

The effects of the display button during playback (top) and shooting (bottom).

Flash (7.50)
With the FH20, Casio has heeded some of the complaints about its big brother, the EX-F1, and instituted a manual flash release, rather than having the flash pop up automatically. Once deployed, the strobe is raised quite far above the lens, which should help reduce red-eye.

For an auto-assist lamp, the camera has a green LED placed to the left of the lens. This didn't seem to help very much, and the FH20 had trouble focusing on anything more than a few feet away in low light conditions. There's a small red LED just to the right of the viewfinder, to let you know when the flash is charging.

Flash intensity can be set to ±2 in 1/3 steps, and has modes for red-eye reduction, flash off, forced flash and automatic. When set on continuous flash shooting mode, you can take an impressive five frames per second. While this does cut down the power to the flash a little, it's still pretty amazing.

The flash recharges quickly to allow for high-speed photography.

Lens (12.75)
As with all ultra-zoom cameras, the FH20 has a lens that allows large magnification, in this case up to 20x. Usually, we'd suggest completely avoiding the 4x digital zoom due to the inevitable loss in image quality, but if you're shooting at low resolution, say for emails, you can actually use it pretty safely without encountering image qualtiy degradation. For instance, if you shoot a 2-megapixel image, the quality doesn't start to deteriorate until approximately 40x zoom, as the system uses a smaller pixel area in the middle of the camera to produce an effective zoom increase.

The lens ranges from 4.6 to 92.0mm (26 to 520mm in 35 mm equivalent). At the widest-angle setting, the aperture range is f/2.8 to f/7.9. Once you go completely telephoto to take a paparazzi shot or two, this shrinks to f/4.2 to f/8.

We were impressed that the FH20 has a substantially larger zoom range than the more expensive F1, which only provides 12x magnification.

The fully extended lens

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