Casio Exilim EX-P505

Reviewed August 2005

Image Quality

The Casio Exilim EX-P505 is quite small, and this can make handling and using the camera a tad more difficult than it should be.

The result is that it can be a bit tricky to hold the camera comfortably and that framing accurately, even with the assistance of the on-screen grid lines, is not always easy.

Nevertheless, the P505 is generally fast to use — it starts and is ready to shoot in under a second when the flash is not needed — and reacts quickly to the shutter release.

Set to its defaults, the P505 establishes the exposure parameters using a multi-metering system that divides the frame into a number of segments and then evaluates each segment to finally calculate an average reading for the entire frame. Generally the metering results in a well-balanced exposure. With very strong contrasts however, we did note that the deepest shadows and the brightest highlights had a tendency to loose some detail.

Colour rendition on the other hand is very good, and the images the P505 yields tend to be very bright and have life-like colours.

The focal length range of the zoom covers the equivalent of a 38 to 190 mm in the 35mm format, which is quite a useful range, and one that is ideal for most photographic subjects. Moreover, while the lens does not offer a constant aperture — a constant aperture is when a selected aperture remains the same at either the wide angle or the telephoto end of a zoom — its starting telephoto aperture of f3.6 is quite close to the wide angle's of f3.3, which means at the telephoto end the lens is sufficiently bright to avoid camera shake under most circumstances.

This said, images captured at the maximum of the telephoto end of the zoom show a bit of pincushion distortion, a type of optical distortion that causes vertical or horizontal lines aligned close to the edges of the frame to appear to curve inward towards the centre of the frame.

Furthermore, we also noted that on occasion purple fringing — a chromatic aberration — could become noticeable towards the edges of the frame.

On the other hand, photos captured using the wide angle end of the zoom had no noticeable barrel distortion, and appeared to have the same sharpness from one edge of the frame to the other, and from corner to corner.

Probably one of the most interesting and unusual features of the P505 is the integration of a Neutral Density filter, a rare feature with digital cameras.

Reducing the amount of light entering the lens by a full 2EV, the ND filter is available for use with the Aperture Priority mode and the Manual mode to allow for slower shutter speeds. In addition, the filter is automatically used with the Shutter Priority mode when the minimum aperture is still too bright for the selected shutter speed.

An effective and useful tool, ND filters would be a welcome addition to most digital cameras and Casio deserves credit for offering it on the P505.

At the highest image quality setting, Fine, the P505 compresses images in a range that commonly hovers from 7:1 to 8:1, a level of compression that is often associated with an average image quality level. And, regrettably, no uncompressed or light compression option is offered. With most subjects the effect of the compression is not detectable. However, with some subjects the compression can lower the image quality somewhat, and when images are looked at on a monitor, at 100% scale, details tend to look a bit fuzzy.

Second, the P505 appears to be a touch more prone to noise than some other 5-megapixel cameras, even when set to 50 ISO. While with outdoor shots noise is generally undetectable, it can become visible in solid colour areas of photos captured with the help of the flash. And, if at 100 ISO the increase in noise is slight, at 200 and 400 ISO noise is easily discernible, even with daylight shots.