Sports, action and wildlife photographers need fast cameras. Indeed, it’s why models such as the 9 fps Nikon D3 and 10 fps Canon EOS-1D Mark III are in such demand even at a premium in terms of price — $5,000 and $8,000 body only, respectively. Until now, such high frame rates have been one of the main selling points of professional and semi-professional cameras from the likes of Nikon and Canon, but all that looks to change with a new camera from consumer electronics company, Casio.

And boy has it changed. Casio’s new F1 doesn’t just beat high-end professional models by a few frames, but rather by a factor of six. The Casio F1 can shoot images at a staggering 60 fps which brings the model into the realms of high-speed photography. Therefore, it is somewhat fitting to discover that the New York Times had none other than the great-nephew of stroboscopic photo pioneer Harold Edgerton review the camera. According to David Pogue, the camera isn’t perfect in low light and is rather large, but can’t be beat for action photography for $1,000 rrp.

A typical shirt-pocket camera, if you’re lucky, can snap one photo a second in “burst mode.” A $1,000 semipro model will get you 3 shots a second. But this Casio can snap are you ready for this? 60 photos a second. These are not movies; these are full six-megapixel photographs, each with enough resolution for a poster-size print.

After such a burst, you’re offered three options: delete all 60 shots, keep all 60, or review them and pluck out the individual frames worth keeping. The whole batch begins to play like a flip-book movie; you control playback with a back-panel control dial. As you watch, you press the shutter button once to identify each frame you want to keep; the rest will be discarded.

[...]

(As I experimented with the F1, I couldn’t help feeling that my great-uncle Harold Edgerton would have approved. He was the M.I.T. professor who, in the late 1930s, pioneered the art of high-speed photography: the bullet piercing an apple, the splash of a milk drop, and so on.)

[...]

But make no mistake: no camera has ever offered anything like the F1′s high-speed stills, high-speed videos or high-speed flash for anywhere near its price. Everybody who sees this camera in action winds up slack-jawed with disbelief.

Casio deserves congratulations for innovating in so many big, bold, industry-defying ways. Instead of pushing misleading metrics like megapixels, the company went its own defiant way and came up with a camera with an extremely clearly defined identity.

The NYT review is here.

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