Casio Announces Upgraded Wrist Camera


Casio WQV-10

Casio of Japan said it would launch the WQV-10, a new wrist camera equipped with a color-screen, on November 23, 2001. Since the release of the first version in June 2000, Casio has been marketing the wrist camera series. The WQV-10 is the third-generation model after the version released in July 2001, which was capable of capturing color images but was not equipped with a color display.

The new WQV-10 features a 176 x 144 color, reflective STN LCD, a color CMOS sensor and 4,096 colors. The 1/14-inch 28,000-pixel CMOS imager supports an effective pixel count of 25,344. The watch camera can hold up to 100 images in its 1-MByte built-in flash memory chip. The camera supports a 2x digital zoom, although it is not very useful, considering the resolution. The lack of backlighting makes the screen difficult to see at night; however, little lighting is enough for viewing the reflective screen. The battery lasts about six months when watch function alone is used. The image-recording format is JPEG (176 x 144 pixels). The new wrist camera supports Casio's proprietary infrared communication interface (max. 115.2 Kbps). Casio plans to produce 20,000 units a month.

This article is (c) copyright 2001 and courtesy of Portelligent TechAlert Service