Hybrid GPS and in-camera 'Art Entertainment' highlight Casio's Photokina news
Casio's Hybrid GPS Exilim EX-H20G will soon go on sale
Casio has finally announced that its Hybrid GPS prototype camera, shown earlier this year at CES and PMA, is to go into production as the Exilim EX-H20G. We covered this earlier in the year as part of our PMA Show coverage. Since then, the camera as gained a couple more megapixels, to 14.1MP.
Hybrid GPS employs both satellite fixes and inertial sensing so the camera can maintain knowledge of your location even if the GPS received can't see the sky for a limited period.
Hiroshi Nakamura, Managing Director, Casio Computer, reminded the press that Casio has been innovating in the field of digital cameras for over 15 years.
The camera has built in maps and you can geo-tag your photos in the camera, building up a photo-illustrated location database based on your travels. I asked Jin Nakayama, Casio's research and development chief, why camera companies had been relatively slow to offer GPS and other location-based and networking features that are now commonplace in smartphones. He reminded me that Hybrid GPS is still pretty much unique to Casio, but did state that Casio would very much like to add internet connectivity to future cameras as soon as possible.
Casio's new Art Entertainment filters include an in-camera processed High Dynamic Range (HDR) function, although to our eyes this feature definitely needs a user-option to adjust the scope of the result.
Meanwhile, a new feature that Casio thinks is ground-breaking is its Art Entertainment offering. Basically these are so-called 'Art Filters' along lines already seen in cameras from some of Casio's rivals. Focus of attention was made to Casio's HDR Art option, whereby the camera takes several images in very rapid succession, almost seeming like a single exposure to the photographer, and then processes the images internally to produce a High Dynamic Range result. Features like this are, we think, basically very welcome, but we weren't alone in thinking the sample results we were shown were over-cooked. Mr. Nakayama did hint that Casio would make the feature adjustable in the future.
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