A Digital Camera from the Future

Wouldn't it be interesting if somebody shipped a gadget from the future -- say, a typical PC or a cell phone from the year 2015?
The PC might have a 72-inch multi-touch display, 64 terabytes of holographic memory, infinite solid-state storage and a 45Gbps connection to the Internet. The cell phone could be the size and shape of a credit card, with a fold-out 14-inch hi-def screen and might also be used as a Taser.

Products like these would blow everyone's minds. Interestingly, a digital camera from the future has been announced, and nobody has yet acknowledged it as such. The camera is the $1,000 Casio EX-F1, and it ships in March.

When Casio demonstrated the camera at CES, the gadget press "oooh'ed" and "aaah'ed" about the camera's high-speed image capture, but nobody seemed to realize that the EX-F1 isn't just some prosumer camera with a parlor trick, but technology that represents the future of all cameras.

What's So Futuristic About the EX-F1?

If you're taking a picture of, say, someone jumping into a swimming pool, the EX-F1 will take 30 pictures in the half-second after you press the button. But magically, it will also take 30 pictures the half-second BEFORE you pressed the button. A scroll wheel on the back lets you quickly scroll through these 60 pictures to find the best one. Once you've found it, you press a button, and that shot is saved to the camera's storage -- the rest are left to die in the cache.

You can spread this record-shattering burst mode beyond one second all the way up to a minute. But the longer the capture period, the less frequent the snaps. So if you set the camera to take pictures for constantly 12 seconds, it will do so at 5 pictures per second.

This feature will almost guarantee that you'll capture the action at exactly the right moment, enabling amateurs to capture pictures like these.

You can shoot fast in darkness, too. The flash can keep up with 7 images per second until you reach 20 pictures. At rates of between 10 to 60 frames per second, you can opt for a secondary and internal high-speed LED flash.