by David Boles
November 15, 1997
The QV-700 is presently Casio's Top Of The Line Digital Camera and it is truly a feature-packed, delightful camera. Its gigantic 2.5" color LCD display makes it easy to see what you are shooting. The QV-700's advanced CompactFlash™ image storage system makes the camera a beauty not to behold, but a beauty to be held!
A Glowing Wonder
As you can see in the screenshot at the left, the Casio
QV-700 is sleek and bright and well-rounded all around. It fits perfectly in your
hand and is well-balanced. The new 1/4" CCD 180 degree single-access-rotation
photographic element in the camera has over 350,000 pixels. That better helps you
grab fine detail without much grain for quality images you can cherish forevermore.
The camera has a 640x480 maximum resolution and that enables you to get beautifully detailed color images in a small file size. A built-in auto strobe is attached to the lens and that gives you the ability to capture rapid-fire images with one, continual shutter depression. You can also do Time Shooting, Panoramic Shooting and Future Shooting.
How Digital Cameras Work
The hardest thing to get used to while using the new Casio QV-700 is the
difference in photography paradigm. You don't look through a viewfinder as you do
with a film strip camera. You instead look at a live and moving "video
image" from a distance of what the camera sees. When you snap the shutter, that
moving image is made still and saved as a singular moment in time as your image.
Think of this as live "time-slice" photography and you'll never want to go back
to film again!
Open Elements
Beware that the color LCD viewfinder is open to the elements since it's "out
there" (see the screenshot above) and that the screen can easily be scratched or
broken. Also know that since you don't hold the view screen up to your eye,
the preview image in the view screen can be difficult to see with bright sunlight behind
you.
Digital Saves You Money
Digital Imaging does away with the middle-man as well. No longer do you
need to take your raw film to the photography store for developing. Your camera
"develops" the images you take instantly and you can transfer the images to
another Casio digital camera, display them on your home television with via built-in NTSC
video output (the connection cable is included) or you can print your images on a Casio
dye-sublimation printer!
Casio DP-8000 Digital Printer
The Casio DP-8000 color dye-sublimation digital printer is the solution you seek for
getting high quality paper "photographs" of your digital images. You can
read my Go Inside review of the DP-8000 here.
4 AA Batteries... And Counting!
The QV-700 is powered by four AA batteries and that makes the camera a bit heavy
and extremely dependent upon those four cells for powering everything the camera
can do. That's asking a lot. After only 28 Fine Mode photographs and 3
postcard printings, my batteries died! The optional AC adapter is paramount if you
plan to do a lot of shooting. I only wish the AC adapter were included with the
camera because I don't think you can live without having it nearby if you're serious about
using the QV-700 as your single camera of choice.
CompactFlash™
The key
to the special success of the QV-700 is it's ability to use CompactFlash™
technology. CompactFlash™ cards are a new technology that hold massive amounts
of information safely and in a non-volatile manner. CompactFlash™ does all this
in a tiny form factor the size of a half-dollar! The image at the left is the
CompactFlash™ card I took out of my QV-700 and it appears in its actual size!
Pretty small, eh?
The included 2 MB CompactFlash™ card is not enough room for serious picture taking. Buy at least an additional 15MB CompactFlash™ card and use it as your one and only storage choice. You could buy a series of CompactFlash™ cards and swap them in and out of your camera like film rolls, but that seems to defeat the purpose of CompactFlash™'s large storage/small form factor capacity. Who wants to carry around a bunch of tiny storage cards? Buy a big 15MB or bigger CompactFlash™ card and use that exclusively.
A 15MB CompactFlash™ card should let you take 105 Fine Mode images -- more than enough for pleasure and fun without having to swap CompactFlash™ cards. I prefer to take Fine Mode images and I can only store a measly 14 Fine Mode images on the bundled 2MB CompactFlash™ card (Normal mode stores 26 images and Economy mode stores 47 and these modes give you more storage, but lesser quality images due to higher compression ratios).
If you buy the extra PCMCIA adapter from Casio, you can take your CompactFlash™ card and stick it directly in your laptop (or other PCMCIA compatible device). You can then pull the photographs out of the card with the bundled QV-Link software without having to use the camera.
QV-Link Computer Software
The software that links your camera to your computer is called QV-Link
and its interface is very basic and uncomplicated to use. Plug in the bundled
communications cord from your camera to your computer's serial port and you'll be able to
manipulate images in your camera from your computer.
When you bring an image into QV-Link for editing, a progression thermometer presents itself in order to show you precisely were you are in the image transfer from camera to computer.
Once the upload is complete, you have thumbnail "filmstrip" images you can double-click from within QV-Link for editing.
In the screenshot below, you can see all the QV-Link information about the directly imported image. "F-Cam" means the photo was taken in "Fine" mode and is presently stored in Casio's proprietary "CAM" file extension (you can change that file type in a file SAVE AS to TIFF, BMP, PICT, or JPEG or you can keep it in CAM). You can also see the present physical file size of the image is 122kb. You can see the image is sized at maximum resolution (640x480). You can also see that the image's color depth is True Color (16.77 million colors).
Delightful Color
As you can see in the screenshot below, the color capabilities of the Casio
QV-700 are, without a doubt, beautiful and incredibly rich and deep. The Indian you
see was not alive when the image was taken. He is a second generation image.
The original image was a photograph from my wife's Indian collection. I then took an
image of the photograph with my QV-700 in Fine mode to test color saturation but not
depth-of-field (that would be my next test). This photograph is very colorful and
fine -- a raging success in testing the color capabilities of the QV-700. The flash
was off for this photograph and everything is sharp and clear because there was
no depth-of-field to contend with during the process.
Built-In Flash
The built-in flash for the Casio QV-700 is a difficult monster to handle.
You can fiddle with the flash and lens apertures to create your own settings, but for the
purpose of this review, I used the Flash in default mode (that means the QV-700 would
decide if and when to fire an automatic flash) and then I turned the flash off and took a
photograph. These are the two most likely cases of use for the average home consumer
of QV-700 technology.
In my informal tests, the flash was always too bright and too harsh -- giving the photographs an unnatural and shallow feel. Take a look at the photograph below. I ordered up my Wooden Soldier collection for shooting and when I took a normal macro photo in Fine mode, the flash went off automatically and that made for a murky and dim photograph. There was a warm and natural light washing over the soldiers in the room from a giant picture window covered with sheer draperies, but the QV-700 decided to fire the flash anyway.
I purposefully placed my white sailor in the middle of the photograph to test the QV-700's responsiveness to variations in color. You can see the white sailor (especially his over-exposed nose) but the brown Cossack on the right is dim and the red infantry man on the left blends into the background along with the blue infantry man behind him. This image, while dark, is, however, very sharp in detail. That's an important distinction with a difference as you will soon see.
No Flash!
Now take a look at the image below. You can see my soldiers much easier to
see now! Macro mode is still on, but I manually turned OFF the Flash so it would not
strobe and the Casio drank in the ambient light in my living room and brought out the
colors of all the soldiers quite nicely.
The tone is even and there is quite a lot of depth between all the soldiers. However, the shot is not as sharply focused as the image above -- you can't change the focal length of the QV-700 and I didn't move my position between shots -- so that fuzziness is probably due to the lack of a flash to help enlighten and better define the carved features of my soldiers.
The Bottom Line
My QV-700 test bed begs an obvious trade-off between using the flash and having
sharp features with dim colors versus a no-flash image that provides richer colors but
less refined, more grainy, features.
What Else Do you Get?
The QV-700 also has a neat virtual folder system that lets you manage and
categorize your images into six separate areas. This helps you keep track of a large
amount of photographs. You can also add titles to your images by selecting a banner
and a color and the camera will combine them. You can pick 30 different colors via Visual
Revolution for the left and right background margins. Visual Combination
engages your desire to "cut out" your images into four distinct patterns
(circle, vertical oval, horizontal oval and brush) and combine them with other images for
dramatic effect. The QV-700 employs all these features through a sophisticated and
graphical menu system you ignite by pushing selected buttons on the top of the camera.
Future Casio QVs?
I hope the future will hold a Casio QV digital camera that will include a Zoom
lens, better battery management, a larger bundled CompactFlash™ Card of at least 15MB
and a Strobe Flash that is softer and kinder to features and landscapes. But other
than those small wishes, the present-day Casio QV-700 is a fun-filled scream machine and
it won't do you wrong if you leap up and buy it right now.
Conclusion
The Casio QV-700 Digital Camera is presently the best of breed and it'll cost you around
$580.00 on the street. You can't beat the performance or the dollar value at any
price. You can visit Casio and their full line of digital cameras here.
Copyright © 1997 by David Boles
"Go Inside" is a David Boles Trademark