Casio Exilim EX-TR100 – Style-Over-Substance

The Casio Exilim EX-TR100 boasts an unusual metal body, which also is known as “Tryx”. The body of the camera looks more like a smartphone than a compact camera.

The Exilim EX-TR100 measures 15 mm wide and boasts a 3 in touch-sensitive display screen. The camera only has two physical buttons in the form of shutter and power buttons.

The body of the camera sits with the metal external surface of the camera which can easily be flipped externally and can also be rotated in a complete circle. This doesn’t only mean that you will be able to use the camera in almost uncountable positioned, but at the same time it means that the metal frame of the camera will be used as a grip for reducing the blurring in the shots when shooting form hand. The metal frame of the camera was also pretty effective in achieving shake-free video clips. The Exilim EX-TR100 has capacity to record HD video at 1080 p resolution, in addition to the 12-MP still shots.

There also is an alternative of shooting at a lot low resolution, but with a significantly increased frame rate of around 240-fps (frames per second). When you replay that at normal speeds you will get a slow motion effect, and hence it’s pretty decent for action shooting.

Unluckily, you will not be able to go too close to the action, considering the fact that design has its own problems. The Exilim EX-TR100 doesn’t have any optical zoom, and only has a digital zoom which demeans the quality of the picture, and hence the lens of the camera is fixed at the corresponding of a 21 mm wide-angle in previous 35 mm film terms. Now that is pretty handy for landscapes but at the same time lends closer portraits a slightly distorted ‘fish-eye’ consequence. The chances of you covering the lens with your finger are also pretty great during moving the screen of the camera.

The Exilim EX-TR100 comes with a camcorder-style LED spotlight rather than a flash, which needs to be activated manual with the help of the touchscreen menu. One problem here is that once you turn it on, it remains on, and that drains the battery faster than normal. The camera only delivered 200 shots from a complete charge, which according to us is a tad disappointing. But the good thing here is that the bright lens here means that there’s no need for flash in the darker conditions because the lens automatically allows a lot more light than the lens on the other camera.

Finally we’d say that the picture quality from the Casio Exilim EX-TR100 wasn’t significantly better than the picture quality that we found on the other cameras or for that matter even wasn’t comparable with a respectable smartphone, with purple fringing pretty apparent. In simple terms the Casio Exilim EX-TR100 is a style-over-substance camera.