Review: Casio QV-3500EX
Don Bradbury tries out the 3.3 megapixel QV-3500EX digital camera.
| Product | QV-3500EX |
|---|---|
| Company | Casio |
| Web | www.casio.co.uk/ |
| Price | £500 (or £700 incl a 512MB IBM Microdrive) |
| We like | |
| We don't like | |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
SLR-style digital cameras are already on the scene, but for its QV-3500EX model Casio has stuck with the tried and trusted format we've all become accustomed to. That's to say, a straight through optical viewfinder supplemented by an LCD screen, the latter doubling as the image viewing medium.
It's a workable arrangement provided you don't forget the problem of parallax, ie close-up image displacement due to the taking lens not being in exactly the same position as the optical viewfinder if that's your natural medium for image composition.
LCD screens tend to be unusable in bright light, but for many shooting situations they are acceptable. Just remember to use it when the situation demands, especially close-ups. Having become accustomed to SLR-style viewfinders, I ruined one or two otherwise good pictures with this Casio model at first, but it's mainly down to familiarity.
In almost every other respect I liked this digicam. It isn't a particularly small camera, but it sits nicely in the hands and handles well. It has easily reached and used controls, with sensible on-screen menus, a fast f2.0-2.5 lens, a 3x (33-100mm equivalent on 35mm) zoom supplemented by digital zooming up to a total of 12x, and informative LCD panels where the settings you choose are displayed.
Power
The four AA Alkaline batteries arrived all but flat, but Alkalines are not very suitable for digital cameras. My trusty NiMH batteries worked well - and for a reasonable length of time, too. The power supply question is important on a 3.3Mega Pixel camera that is equipped with a mere 8MB of CompactFlash memory, as here, as I shall explain in a minute.
Five 1MB images at the highest JPEG quality are all you'll get on the supplied memory card, and that's, frankly, not sufficient. But the QV-3500EX accepts an IBM Microdrive, and that's the saving factor. It will cost you a substantial amount to add one but, happily, I could supply my own.
340MB of storage is something like, and with the capacity for around 250 pictures of the highest JPEG quality, I was very content to shoot away all day with that setup. You don't have to remove the Microdrive every five minutes to pop it in a card reader for download, or, worse, download captured images via the provided USB link with the same frequency.
That's just as well because removing the memory card is a tad awkward on this camera. It doesn't eject quite far enough for you to grab hold of it. Just jab the eject button and then tip it out of the slot under the influence of good old gravity, that's what I did.
Back to my point; physical drives like the Microdrive consume more power than solid state memory cards, and you really need one (or at the very least a high capacity solid state card) so power supply is important. Fortunately, this Casio camera copes adequately.
And counting
So 250 images at the highest setting, right up to way beyond 999 at the lowest resolution (1024 x 768, economy), will fit on the 340MB Microdrive. 999 is the counter's maximum, which is a shame for those who really do need to keep tabs of hundreds of lower quality shots. In fact 999 shots maximum were registered at 1024, normal, as well, and 995 on the latter's fine setting.
So this picture counter only really worked with maximum resolution shots where it registered that 250 to 550 shots were available, depending on the degree of JPEG compression. We won't mention the TIFF mode; you're simply not going to notice the benefit, and at nearly 1GB per shot you'll probably never use it.
Fast optics
The fast (for a zoom) f2.0 lens by Canon stops down to f8 in manual or aperture priority mode, and the shutter speed is variable between 60 secs and 1/1000th sec. ISO 100 (default) to 500 was the range of equivalent film speeds for the CCD sensitivity. This is a useful variable to have, as has been explained in a previous digital photography feature in these pages.
For a digicam, shots were judged to be fairly sharp (compared with film, which rates as excellent these days), with good colour saturation and adequate shadow and highlight detail (see the Foxglove shot). Actually, you can opt for on-the-fly sharpening (or softening) if you want, though some artefact injection might be an off-putting penalty if you do. Better to leave that to image editing software, I think, where you'll have the option to double up on images, with and without the tweak.
I did notice that the camera's auto-focusing was fooled once or twice under low-light (indoor) conditions. Locating the critical focus plane is most desirable under close-up, wide aperture shooting conditions such as these, and camera's do vary in their capacity to cope with low contrast subjects.
Ergonomics
The shutter release was smooth, though I thought it gave rather minimal feedback to the user of the instant of shutter activation. There was a fairly quiet beep option, but I prefer either a somewhat louder click, or better still, a simulated focal plane shutter sound. Ambient noises drowned out the Casio's beep too easily.
A thirteen page (in English, though multi-language) manual might be considered rather brief, especially as you have things like the 'best shot' and 'video burst' modes to cope with. The former offers a wide range of preset exposure types, and the latter lets you shoot short video clips. Both were minimally described in the paper manual.
Infinity, manual, auto, and macro focusing (the latter not particularly inspiring in terms of range by current standards) cover the focus ranges. Normal, portrait, landscape, night scene, panorama, and the 'best' and 'video' modes mentioned previously, cover subject type optimisations, plus the usual over-rides for exposure and white balance. All are usefully supplemented by spot, centre, and multi metering modes. All-in-all, a rather neat and desirable package.
In conclusion
With digital images of generally good quality for the money, and offering a commendably wide range of features, together with Epson's Print Image Matching (PIM) technology (printers for which are just coming in), this digicam should satisfy all but the most fastidious digital photographer. It has its weaknesses, but nothing in this world is perfect. At the price it's a good buy, and it's certainly recommended for inclusion in your short list. But do consider the image storage and potential low-light focusing problems.
