Casio Exilim EX-H15 review

The 14 megapixel Exilim EX-H15 is the latest in a long line of compact travel zoom cameras from Casio and it boasts some impressive features. However, at just under £200, it faces a lot of competition from established competitors including Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-TZ10, Samsung’s WB650 and Canon’s PowerShot SX210 IS.

It’s part of the company’s H series of ‘high speed, high zoom’ cameras and sits in between the EX-FH100 and EX-H5 which we recently reviewed. The EX-H15 is available in four colours – silver, black, pink and brown – which all have the same chrome accenting. We’ve got the pink version here, which we have to say is not to our personal tastes.

The H15 includes Casio’s new Exilim Engine 5.0 processor, which promises to improve the camera’s operational performance by 30 per cent. The 10x optical zoom lens gives you flexibility for a wide range of photographic scenarios and ranges from 24 to 240mm in 35mm equivalent focal lengths.

Despite the EX-H15’s impressive operational speed, its headline feature is actually the lofty 1,000 shot battery life. We filled a couple of 4GB SDHC cards with images taken on the EX-H15 and there were no signs of it running out of juice, meaning there’s no need to worry if you’ve gone on holiday and forgotten the charger!

This battery does add some bulk to the H15, but at 29mm thick, it’s no more cumbersome than its competitors with similar focal ranges and is still pocketable. It tips the scales at 206g with both battery and SD card installed, giving it a robust feeling. The small hand grip also helps make the camera easier to hold, giving you something positive to hang onto – a lot of compacts these days do away with protrusions in favour of sleeker lines, which often makes them more delicate to hold.

The buttons on the back are large and well-spaced, giving the user access to most of the important controls without having to adjust their grip on the camera. Shooting modes are accessed via the BS – or Best Shot – button, and there are more than 40 scene, subject and art filter modes to choose from. These automatically optimise the camera for the type of photographs you’re trying to take, but there’s very little in the way of manual controls. There is a dedicated video recording button, though.

Video is recorded at 720p at 30fps in the Motion JPEG format at a bit rate of 30Mbps, but quality isn’t that great. It struggles a bit with panning and it’s quite noisy, but it’s passable. The soundtrack is recorded by a single mono microphone at a bit rate of 177kbps, which again isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s good enough for its intended use. Both focusing and zoom controls are disabled, which is probably for the better as they’re both quite noisy in operation.

Operational speed was very impressive for a camera of this class, turning on in under two seconds. Shot-to-shot time was about a second in the standard auto mode, but increased to a few seconds when using one of the scene modes, art filters or the Premium Auto mode as there’s some extra processing after the shot has been recorded. We can’t heap quite as much praise on the HS mode though, as it’s a bit of a gimmick. It records at either 10fps at 1,280×960 or 4fps at 1,600×1,200, but picture quality is quite poor with an overall soft feel and a lack of detail.

Given the extreme focal range, Casio has been wise to kit the EX-H15 out with image stabilisation of the sensor-shift variety, which moves the sensor to compensate for vibrations that become more of a problem at longer focal lengths. We found it worked quite well, but even in good lighting conditions there were still shots that suffered from camera shake.

Otherwise, the EX-H15 produces bright and well-saturated photos in good light, but there’s a loss of sharpness in the corners at the two extreme ends of the H15’s focal range. At wider angles barrel distortion is also quite extreme, giving you something else to consider, but photos taken between about 40mm and 200mm (equivalent) don’t exhibit many problems. Sharpness across the frame isn’t bad, although we found that the bottom left hand corner was a little softer than the rest of the frame at all focal lengths.

We also saw all the typical characteristics of a 14 megapixel 1/2.3in CCD sensor, meaning pixel fringing was visible at 100 per cent zoom and low light performance is not surprisingly a weak point. Despite this, Casio has done a reasonable job with its noise reduction algorithm and the EX-H15 produces acceptable images at up to ISO 400, with detail and sharpness starting to suffer at ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 border on unusable as resolution loss caused by noise reduction is quite harsh – at ISO 3200, edge definition is almost completely lost and there’s not only colour shifting, but also a lot of banding.

Despite these quibbles, there’s a lot to like about the EX-H15’s practicality and it serves its purpose well. Both still and motion picture quality is quite good, and the lens isn’t bad either – you can take pretty good photos with the minimum of fuss. What makes the EX-H15 stand out though is the very long battery life which makes it the perfect camera for taking on holiday if you’re travelling light. It’s similarly priced against its competitors and may not be quite as attractive as the TZ10 or WB650, which both have a built-in GPS unit, but it’s otherwise a very capable camera.