Image Quality

One thing that stood out in the press release for the QV-3000EX was the fact that it had a Canon lens. Unlike previous Casio's (and many other digicams from non-camera manufacturers) which normally use an OEM lens, this Casio is blessed with a good quality, fast lens (F2.0).

This choice has definitely paid off. Image quality is extremely good, most noticeable is an almost complete lack of chromatic aberrations even in shots which would typically pick up chromatic aberrations such as this crop of a top-corner of a daylit image with fine cables. This gives us a hint as to the quality of the lens.

The next bit of good news comes again from the lens, the camera suffers only very very slight barrel distortion (really hardly noticeable) at full wide and no pincushion at full tele. So as far as getting a quality image onto the CCD we're ok. The rest is down to the quality of the CCD, associated electronics and the processing algorithm. All of which do a pretty good job. Of all the digicams I've reviewed I'd put the QV-3000EX's image quality in the top five.

Colours are neutral and well balanced (if you like a brightly coloured image then just push the saturation up in the menu), white balance is generally good though the camera can sometimes get confused (using manual override solves this). Images down to a pixel level are fairly sharp, though I did get the feeling they could have been a little sharper, also in some cases the bottom end of the dynamic range was a little lacking, black wasn't quite black. But these really are niggles and don't detract from a camera which can produce some stunning images.

Noise is also fairly low, some visible at slower shutter speeds and of course if you increase sensitivity, the night mode with its noise reduction was an interesting addition though longer exposures (than 1 second) would have been more appropriate.

Compared with the Canon S20 & Nikon Coolpix 990

The following scenes were shot with each camera from the same tripod, same lighting within minutes of each other. Cameras were set to automatic white balance. The 990 used here is full production firmware v1.0 but non-QC.

Unaltered Originals

In the first set of samples below each 100% (1:1) crop was taken out of unaltered images, remembering that each of these cameras has different pixel counts you need to look at the image quality and amount of definition rather than size of details.

Subject One: Test Poster Shot
Casio QV-3000EX 2048 x 1536 Untouched 1,115 KB	Nikon Coolpix 990 2048 x 1536 Untouched 1,003 KB	Canon Powershot S20 2048 x 1536 Untouched 895 KB
Well there's really not that much in it is there? To get a better impression look at the whole image in context. The QV-3000EX's image is cooler (bluer) but fairly sharp, there are some odd colour aberrations around pure primary colours. The 990's image is probably the best overall, sharpness and detail definition, colours are exactly as the original poster and whites are very good.
Subject Two: Still Life Bottles
Casio QV-3000EX 2048 x 1536 Untouched 1,230 KB	Nikon Coolpix 990 2048 x 1536 Untouched 982 KB	Canon Powershot S20 2048 x 1536 Untouched 919 KB
Here we can see that the QV-3000EX is a little softer than the rest, in a pure sharpness contest it's between the Coolpix 990 and PowerShot S20, colour balance is closest on the Coolpix 990, it deals especially well with the bright blue on the Martini bottle which gets washed out by the QV-3000EX. Colours on the S20 seem washed out (and again) cooler (bluer) which does make whites seem whiter but pushes down the saturation of other colours.
Subject Three: Resolution Chart
Casio QV-3000EX 2048 x 1536 Untouched 1,092 KB	Nikon Coolpix 990 2048 x 1536 Untouched 1,074 KB	Canon Powershot S20 2048 x 1536 Untouched 692 KB
Again, the Coolpix 990 produced the best colour balanced image, sharpness between the QV-3000EX and Coolpix 990 were very similar. No camera could see the 90dpi lines individually, the QV-3000EX had a very slight blue/red moiré pattern on this very fine detail.