The Casio EX FH100 is a beautiful and solidly built camera that is comfortable to hold and easy to operate. It's fairly compact and pocketable for a camera that has a long and versatile 10x zoom lens, 24mm wide to 240mm telephoto. The FH100 produces very good quality images and provides comprehensive photographic controls for a compact. It can even output raw files, but the raw mode is extremely slow.

 

A specialty of the FH100 is its various high-speed capture modes: burst, continuous and movie (low-res). We find the high-speed photo modes a little cumbersome and slow for general use, but they are there to be experimented. High-speed movies are limited to low-res, but can be played with to make cool and fun stuff.

 

Image stabilization is essential at telephoto focal lengths (long zoom end) for cameras with a large zoom range such as the FH100, to prevent camera-shake from blurring the pictures when shooting hand-held. Casio chooses the CCD/sensor shift image stabilization technique, which can help, but it's not as effective as the preferred lens based optical image stabilization. It's very easy to see and compare the effect of these two stabilization techniques. For example, zoom the Casio FH100 to 240mm and try to hold a composition still, and then try to do the same thing with a Sony HX5V - the image or composition on the HX5V's LCD is stable while the FH100's is more jittery.

 

Overall, the Casio EX FH100 is an excellent camera that can produce very good quality images. However, it faces tough competitors such as the Sony Cyber-shot HX5V and Panasonic Lumix ZS7, which have optical image stabilization, optical video zoom and built-in GPS.

 

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