The Exilim slow motion EX-F1 isn't new anymore, but it's still one of the most fun cams out there. What's key for me is the switch to quickly jump from 30 to 300fps, which I've mapped to the focus ring.

The song is These Days from the Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack, which is one of my favorite movies. [Amazon]

Snowmodo is our snow sport winter meet up at Lake Tahoe, with prizes, discounts, tons of fun snow activities, a party and GADGETS. If you can make it (and people are coming from TEXAS) please RSVP. I'll let you wear my hat (below).

CASIO RELEASES FIRMWARE UPDATE FOR EXILIM PRO EX-F1 ULTRA-HIGH SPEED BURST SHOOTING DIGITAL CAMERA

Update Adds New “Prerecord Movie” Function That Permits Movie Capture to Commence 5 Seconds before the User Actually Presses the Movie Button

DOVER, NJ, JULY 7, 2008 – Casio America, Inc. and its parent company, Casio Computer Co., Ltd., announced a firmware update for the EXILIM® Pro EX-F1 digital camera today. The update will add Casio’s unique “Prerecord movie” function to the camera, helping to ensure that users will never miss another once-in-a-lifetime scene when shooting movies. Firmware Ver. 1.10 for the EX-F1 will be available on Casio’s English website starting July 8, and thereafter on websites in other languages.

Released in March this year, the EXILIM Pro EX-F1 features ultra-high speed burst shooting, enabling users to capture every instant of each priceless memory at 60 still images per second in high resolution, 6.0-megapixel quality. It also comes with a High Speed movie mode that records up to 1,200 frames per second, permitting ultra-slow motion playback of movement that is too fast for the human eye to perceive. The EX-F1 has won great acclaim and popularity as the first of an entirely new genre of digital cameras that is totally changing the nature of photography.

Casio introduced Firmware Ver. 1.02 in April 2008 to improve the camera’s ease of use. That release offered a greatly reduced start-up time and enabled high speed zooming when recording Full High-Definition movies. The new Firmware Ver. 1.10 adds the Prerecord Movie function, which, when turned on, permits movie capture to commence 5 seconds before the user actually presses the Movie Button. Prerecord Movie works with all movie modes, including 30 fps Standard movie mode, the 300 fps, 600 fps and 1200 fps High Speed movie modes, and the Full High-Definition movie mode. This firmware update will help users get the most out of their EXILIM Pro EX-F1 digital cameras. The days of shooting movies but missing the best part of the moment are gone.

Firmware Ver. 1.10 for the EXILIM Pro EX-F1 will be available for download free of charge from Casio’s website.

New Features in Firmware Ver. 1.10

Prerecord Movie function added, allowing recording to commence 5 seconds before the user presses the Movie Button

• Compatible with 300 fps, 600 fps, 1200 fps, and 30-300 fps High Speed movie modes

• Compatible with 1920x1080 pixel Full High-Definition movie mode

• Compatible with 1280x720 pixel High-Definition movie mode

• Compatible with 30 fps Standard movie mode

• Both can do full high-def shooting—Casio at 1080i but Samsung beats it, with 1080p
• The Samsung can do slow-mo at 300 frames per second (presumably in standard def, but maybe in HD; Casio can do 300fps, 600fps and 1200fps
• Both can take still pictures while shooting video—very helpful indeed
• Although the Samsung is positioned as a camcorder and the Casio is called a camera, they both have 6-megapixel CMOS sensors

Given the CES announcement and the Korea launch, we can only assume that the HMX20 will be one of the items in Samsung's summer line show lineup. That's good news for everybody—except maybe Casio. [Samsung Press Release via PC World]

Woodhead compensated for the 1200fps' paltry 336x96 frame size by stitching four different Mentos tests together, and the results are awesome. Globs, ribbons and rings of Coke that are impossible to track in real time come to life when seen in slow-motion.

Watch out later today for another homemade slow-mo video; things will only get messier. [Robert Woodhead]

You've already seen the slow-mo tomato blending, and you've seen the slow-mo DIY backyard Discovery Channel. You get it, it can do slow-mo. But there are other features that stand to be demo'd on video, so take a look:
Let's recap exactly what talents the camera has that have not, in any meaningful combination, been seen before in a consumer-level camera:
• Slow-mo video shooting at 300, 600 and 1200 frames per second
• Fast-slow-fast shooting from 30fps to 300 and back to 30 — I call this the "she walked in the room" mode, because it's what they do in cheesy 80s movies to indicate the protagonist's love interest
• High-speed 6-megapixel shots at 60fps
• Strobe shooting of stills at 7 frames per second with standard flash; 60fps with LED flash
• Full-resolution still shooting while capturing HD video
• Fly-in and fly-out auto modes, which capture still shots at 60fps when the subject enter or exit the frame

EX-F1 as Camcorder
As a camcorder, it covers a lot of bases. In HD mode, it can shoot 60 "fields" at 1920x1080—that's code for 1080i—and 30 "frames" at 1280x720, all the while letting you take a total of 20 6-megapixel still shots. Since David Pogue's review ran, Casio published firmware 1.02 that fixes a major complaint: When shooting video, you now can actively use the 12x optical zoom lens.

We've covered the slow-motion camera already quite a bit, but let me be clear: it shoots 300, 600 or 1200 fps and encodes them on the fly to an H.264 file at 30 frames per second. So 1 second of shooting equals 10 seconds of footage. This causes some challenges, like long periods of lag between action, but there's a very easy in-camera editing tool that deletes all unneeded footage. You can't use the zoom in high-speed mode, but trust me, there's no time to zoom when you're shooting like that.

As you saw in the video above, there's also a mode for going from standard-def 30fps to slow-mo 300fps and then back again, what I call the "she walked into the room" mode. It's pretty cool, and probably more useful than just standard slow-mo.Also, to recap: when shooting at 300fps, you get "standard" video resolution of 512x384. At 600fps, it drops to a tolerable widescreen, 432x192. But when you shoot in 1200fps, you end up with a bizarre 336x96, really long and thin. There's also a major loss of light when switching from standard to slow-mo, and then each subsequent jump. 1200fps is only good outdoors on a very sunny day, but even 300fps is no good in any kind of dim light. It makes sense, of course, but you need to consider it, especially if you're into experimental amateur porn cinematography.

Auto-focus is decent for still shooting, but I sometimes found for slow-mo video that it was simpler just to go manual. If you start recording slow-mo video out of focus, there's very little hope that it will focus during your shot.

One other frustration I experienced was that videos occasionally came out garbled or unreadable. I hope the 1.02 firmware update has a fix for that—I can only assume it's a known and fixable problem, albeit an annoying one.

EX-F1 as Still Camera
To be clear, this camera is the anti-DSLR. It's as digital as you can get, so you have to expect some photographic shortcomings. But the tradeoffs are reasonable, with still options that are not available anywhere else.

You can shoot full-resolution 6-megapixel stills at up to 60fps, to ensure that you get a decent pic of a fast-moving subject. I preferred to use something more like 7fps or 15fps with pets and kids, since they're not that fast, and you have no idea how annoying it can be to flip through 60 or more identical-looking shots. As with slow-mo video, you do lose the higher f-stop settings when you set it for 60, as everything would just be pitch black. What you do get, though, to compensate, is a strobe flash. Though Pogue thought it was too explosive, I thought it works well when you need it. As you can see from the screenshot above, you can use a real flash up to 7fps, and then you have to switch to a mellower LED light, which can't illuminate everything, but is better than nothing. We intend to subject this camera to some further in-the-trenches club shooting courtesy of Gawker video guy Nick McGlynn (shown here helping me demonstrate flash-strobe mode): The coolest easy-to-miss still settings are the fly-in and fly-out modes: You train your shot on an object like a birds nest or hummingbird feeder, press the shutter and wait until the critter arrives. The camera shoots continuously at 60fps, but only starts saving when it detects the motion, presenting you with a solid set of 60 stills for you to choose the best ones. The other mode does the opposite. You aim it at a critter that is not moving, and when it starts to move, and exit the frame, the camera saves the shots, so you get a dramatic action shot of its departure. As I hinted, low-light shooting isn't great, and the tiny, experimental CCD CMOS in the camera is especially noisy. ISO 1600 is a rainbow of nastiness, and should only be used as a last resort: Shadows are even pretty noisy at lower ISO settings—here's 800:Annoyances aside, I found the EX-F1 to live up to our Bestmodo status because of its versatility and originality. It's nice and rugged, too, capable of withstanding being flung into the air (what good is slow-mo if you can't move fast?). It had a nice long battery life, too: I shot for six days straight—gathering plenty of video and tons of rapid fire full-resolution stills—before the battery died.

Update: Some of you asked about memory capacity, and even though I was shooting with an 8GB SDHC card, the hard limit is 4GB of video. For stills, the buffer can hold 60 shots. Here's the details, from Casio:

The limit would be 4GB of [video] recording. So at 1080i you are looking at about 40 minutes. Now if you had a 8GB card you could [stop and] then take another 40 minute video, but the file system hits 4GB and has to stop recording. [For stills] you can take 60 shots before the buffer is full. So you can do 60fps for 1 second or 30 fps for 2 seconds, 20 fps for 3 seconds, etc.

Everything is a twitch here, a blur there—you have to realize that this whole two-minute video consists of just 10 to 12 seconds of real life, shown at 300fps or 600fps. (1200fps turned out to be too much of a novelty, too dark to be practical, as you can see in the tomato-blender vid.)

Shooting slow-mo takes some getting used to, and because you end up with long stretches of zero movement, the in-cam video editor is not just a luxury but a necessity. In the end, though, everything looks like it's ready for Discovery Channel. I think that chipmunk's gonna be a star. [Casio Exilim EX-F1 Full Review on Giz]

This is probably the happiest tradeoff of resolution to slow-mo devastation. The first video records at 512x384, while this one drops you down to a funky widescreen 432x192.
The 1200fps setting is pretty much a novelty more than anything else, since you need a ton of light, and it records at an all too wide 336x96. We had to crop it so that it made any kind of sense, but here's a screengrab of the original vid:There's more to come with this fun little camera, but we wanted to give you a rather violent taste straight away. You're welcome. [Casio Exilim EX-F1 Full Review on Giz]

And for those of you who can't get that song out of your head, here's a link to the 99-cent MP3 on Amazon. [Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap]

The low light performance sucks, courtesy of a tiny light sensor, which is half the size of a beginner's DSLR. So you need brilliant lighting to avoid dim or blurry shots. And Casio's solution of "one of the brightest and fastest flashes ever on a consumer camera" ain't much of one, unless you're into harshly lit photos.

Topping that bit of suck off, the digital (not optical) eyepiece is crummy, and both start-up and focusing are sloooow. No zooming, during HD video capture either. And high-speed videos offer no sound or any setting changes mid-filming. But overall, Pogue says that those sniggles are "like complaining that your 7-year-old violin virtuoso is lousy at sports" and that "Casio deserves congratulations for innovating in so many big, bold, industry-defying ways." Buy it for speed, not the other stuff. [NYT]

We've procured both sample video of the camera shooting at 300, 600, and 1,200 frames per second as well as a gallery of 60 shots taken in one second by the camera. As you can see, the resolution of the video drops dramatically as the framerate increases, with it recording 512x384 video at 300 fps, 432x192 at 600 fps and a measly 336x96 and 1,200 fps. Sure, it's pretty cool to see a balloon bursting at such slow speeds, but how often you'd use it when the resolution is so lousy is questionable. I'd think that it'd be rare that you'd bump it up much farther than 300 fps, although even that fast is pretty sweet.
The burst shooting, on the other hand, delivers full-quality shots, which is awesome. As you can see from the gallery below, having such a huge array of shots to choose from allows you to really pick the best shot possible, and it's something we could see people getting addicted to using. Look for this sort of feature to start showing up on all sorts of cameras in the near future. Hopefully DSLRs as well, as the EX-F1 isn't one.

Last but not least, here's a video of the actual camera so you can see what to expect when it arrives.

This memory-card-filler will drop in this spring (March is the tentative plan) for $999.99.

If you don't feel like wasting your whole memory card in a second, there's a "slow motion view" that lets you choose which shot you actually want to take by slowing down the action in the viewfinder. Essentially, it takes the 60 shots and tosses any that you don't hit the button during. It can also record movies at a whopping 1,200 frames per second, allowing you to slow it down later without losing image. Last but not least, it records video in high-def at 60fps. It looks to be a pretty hot camera, especially for people who want to take a lot of action shots. It'll drop in March for $999.99.