When most people think of Casio, they think of watches (calculator and G-Shock, most likely) and keyboards of the musical type. What people probably don`t remember is that Casio was a huge innovator in digital photography, creating features that would become standard on cameras introduced years later.
Casio stopped selling cameras in the US several years ago, and it threw in the towel globally in 2018. In this article we`ll take a look back at the innovations that Casio came up with, going all the way back to the mid 1990s.
The story begins in 1994, when Casio introduced the 0.25 Megapixel QV-10, the first consumer digital camera with an LCD and live view (the QV-10A, a variation, is pictured above). It also had a rotating lens that would not only reappear on several other Casio cameras, but on several Nikon and Sony models, as well.
The QV-700 showing off Casio`s trademark rotating lens and low-res LCD. That F2 lens had a focal length equivalent to 38mm. The tiny sensor size combined with the F19-equivalent lens allowed the QV-700 to be fixed focus.
Image courtesy of www.digicammuseum.de, Boris Jakubaschk
The real innovations occurred in 1998 with the release of the QV-700. It offered pre- and post-shot buffering, similar to what Olympus calls Pro Capture today. While it didn`t take many shots, the QV-700 let you save a few images before or after you pressed the shutter release.
Not long after the QV-700 came the QV-7000SX, which brought with it a sort-of movie mode (32 frames at 160 x 120, with no audio) and in-camera panorama stitching (something some cameras still don`t have). It also created an HTML page on your memory card that you could load up in Netscape to browse through your photos.
Note the large IR transmitter/receiver on the front of the QV-7000SX. It could beam photos to the small number of devices that supported the IrTran-P protocol.
Image courtesy of www.digicammuseum.de, Boris Jakubasch ...
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