Casio Announces New QV-5500SX

Thanks to the Imaging-Resource for the following:

Casio Japan has announced a new digital camera due to ship on March 13 in Japan (initially 15,000 units a month). The QV-5500SX is a 1.3 megapixel camera, with a planned price of 63,000 yen (approx. US). The main feature of the new camera is its 16MB of RAM, which allows it to take photos at 0.5 second intervals at a resolution of 1280 x 960 pixels for the first six photos (when using the optical viewfinder - with the LCD in use, this slows to 1 second per photo). The camera can also create animations in AVI format (10 frames per second)

The camera features has a 1/3 inch 1,310,000 pixel CCD, a 1.8 inch 120,000 pixel LCD display, CompactFlash storage, built-in four-mode flash with red-eye reduction, auto and four-mode manual white balance, NTSC and PAL video outputs, switcheable Japanese/English language menus, and the ability to focus down to 10 centimetres. There is no optical zoom, with the lens being fixed at an equivalent of 36mm on a 35mm traditional camera, although a 4x digital zoom is offered. It weighs about 250g without batteries, and can take about 360 photos on four alkaline AA batteries. It also has manual focus, and, in a literal translation of the website, "Various 'Manual setting' which can be freely controlled according to taking a picture intention"

Another interesting feature is the ability to take multiple exposures (in three different ways - average the two pictures, give priority to the brighter image, or give priority to the darker image). The camera can also display a grid on the LCD to help in positioning subjects on the screen (at least, this is what it seems to translate as), and can combine pictures together in the camera to create panoramic images... Another neat idea is that the camera automatically builds an HTML page on the CF card along with the images, enabling you to view the images from a web browser immediately you copy everything to your PC. The Casio website has nine sample images online.