Casio Exilim EX-P505 VGA videos?
 

Hello everyone, has anyone checked out the new Casio Exilim EX-P505? It supposedly delivers the best VGA 30 fps video of any of the current digital still cams. They're calling it a hybrid camera as it's video quality will make some buy it as a digital video camcorder over it's still image capabilities....if anyone buys one let us know how good it performs!

http://www.dcviews.com/press/Casio-EX-P505.htm

For $450 it seems like a great buy.

Canon also has a full 30 fps VGA resolution video camera in one
of their photocams. The problem usually is the form factor and
lack of manual controls that would easily keep you from doing
anything serious with it I think. I saw some movies from the
Canon one and they looked a bit "off" as well (hard to put my
finger on the "issue"), perhaps a bit too sharp.

Rob is referring to the Canon PowerShot S1 IS.

This is a 3.2mp camera using a 10x optical zoom with Image Stabilization. Its movie mode provides VGA quality video at 30fps up to one hour in a single shot, plus the ability to zoom during the shot.

Movie modes appear to be identical between the Canon and Casio.
Advantage to the Casio for 5mp stills vs. 3.2mp on the Canon.
Advantage to the Canon for 10x image stabilized zoom over 5x on the Casio.
Advantage to the Canon for a lower price of $350 vs. $500 for the Casio.

Hope this helps,

I have one, and I wrote a review of it on my website (devoted to the Panasonic SV-AV100 mpeg2 minicam): http://zyvid.com/smf/index.php?topic=58.msg160#msg160

In my opinion, it has two problems - the movies are in mpeg4 and suffer from the usual mpeg4 artifacting effects, and the lens is only a F3.3 and the camera needs too much ambient light to make a picture with an acceptable noise level - even a cloudy day causes the noise level to increase noticeably. On the other hand, it's lots of fun and one can alternate between movies and stills easily, and the ergonomics are splendid. I'd recommend it for outdoor use and family close-ups with flash, but not for any kind of interior ambient lighting or larger scenes like parties or meetings.

Its movie mode is 640x480 29.97fps and it fills a 1GB card in about 33 minutes. It uses the Microsoft proprietary mpeg4 codec and requires the Directshow structures in Windows to view the video - it is not a camera for a Mac user. Post-processing the mpeg4 video isn't very satisfactory compared to DV or even mpeg2 due to the mpeg4 limitations. The camera has 44100Hz s/s sound, 16 bit stereo, and the sound seems to be good quality. If they had put a larger lens on this and boosted the bitrate of the mpeg4 a little this product would have been a technical success but instead it's another "go-anywhere" camera that has places it can't go.