Casio Exilim Pro EX-P505

The EX-P505 leaves the
starting blocks with an
unfortunate handicap – its
price tag. With a web price
of around £320, it’s locking
horns with 7-megapixel models
such as the Canon Digital Ixus
700, Pentax Optio 750Z and Nikon
Coolpix 7900.
to know that more megapixels
doesn’t necessarily translate into
better image quality. But when
a similarly specifi ed 5-megapixel
camera like the Nikon Coolpix
5200 can be picked up for as little
as £150, you can’t help thinking
someone’s got their sums wrong.
Unless of course the Casio is
harbouring something very special.
The EX-P505’s styled like a
prosumer camera, with the 5x
zoom lens housed along its entire
focal length, so you haven’t got
anything hanging out the front at
the long end. There’s nothing in the
way of button shortcuts for the likes
of ISO sensitivity, white balance
or even exposure compensation,
which suggests a common or
garden compact, despite the
racy looks. Having said that, its
looks do count in its favour – the
fi nish is black plastic, but smooth,
solid and delicately styled with a
courteously fashioned handgrip
that does wonders for balance with
one-handed shooting. The fold-out
2-inch LCD helps handling, but
the buttons and thumbpad don’t
deserve the same praise – they’re
shoddy and hardly refl ect a price
tag of £200, let alone £320.
Just a point and shoot?
The decent number of features on
offer belies the relative simplicity
of the EX-P505’s exterior. There
are Centre Spot, Multi Area and
Selectable Area focus options,
built-in neutral density fi lter for 2EV
stops, 1cm macro (which is tops),
the usual three metering options,
manual white balance, fl ash
exposure compensation, memory
presets, as well as compatibility
with the various printing
technologies – PictBridge, DPOF
and Print Image Matching.
In short, it’s got everything you’d
expect from a prosumer model
bar a Continuous Shooting mode,
dedicated auto-exposure lock and
RAW format. Scene modes are
under a confusingly labelled Best
Shot function on the Command
dial, and they’re accompanied
by descriptions and appropriate
images, with the same red border
accorded to the menu system.
There are a couple of unusual
settings for Movie mode – Short
Movie and Past Movie. Past Movie
comprises a continual fi ve-second
recording buffer that initiates as
soon as you select the mode. Once
the shutter’s pressed, you capture
everything until your second press,
as well as fi ve seconds before the
fi rst. Short Movie works in a similar
fashion, but instead it records
before and after the shutter’s
pressed for a maximum of eight
seconds. You’ve also got the ability
to scroll through a movie frame-byframe,
zoom in, capture particular
frames as still images and cut out
parts of a movie in-camera that you
don’t like. Movies are recorded as
memory-effi cient MPEG-4 fi les,
and deliver smooth motion, good
detail and fi ne colours at maximum
size and quality.
Speed is of the essence
A more legitimate boast for the
EX-P505 concerns its performance
– the 0.8-second start-up claim is
accurate. The 0.01-second claim
for shutter lag appears credible,
too – you can’t glean any sense of
pause at all.
Casio doesn’t mention the lag
from capture to ready – there’s a
black-out of 1.5 seconds before
it’s ready to roll again. This isn’t
unusual for a compact, but it’s
an issue that needs to be tackled.
And you’ve got to wait for the full
whack of processing and fi le fl ush
(around 2.5 seconds) before you
can access Playback mode. At least
with Review set to on, you get
your thumbnail immediately. Image
scrolling is instantaneous, as is image
magnifi cation and close-in scrolling.
With regards to image quality,
the lens presents the fi rst hiccup,
exhibiting noticeable barrel
distortion at the wide end. This isn’t
great considering we’re only talking
38mm – there are wider lenses
in the compact market with less
distortion problems.
This camera’s extremely prone
to fl are. Purple fringing (chromatic
aberration) is there, but thankfully
it’s a lot less intrusive than the
norm. At ISO 100 with default
sharpening, there’s more noise
present than there should be and
detail suffers because of it, but
there are worse performers out
there, too. At ISO 200 and ISO 400
things hot up in the noise stakes,
particularly with colour noise.
There isn’t a compact in the
market at the moment that doesn’t
exhibit some sort of problem when
you examine images close up, but
you’d be wise to wait for a price cut
before considering this camera: if
it was reduced to £200, its speed
could make it a player…