Switched

What We Like: Despite the failure of its signature feature, the EX-S12 is a worthwhile buy for its extreme portability and handsome photos that it captures under wide-ranging conditions.

The best camera is the one you have with you, and there's no reason not to take the EX-S12 everywhere. At a featherweight four ounces and scrawny 0.6 inches thick, it's no bulkier than an iPhone.

On top of its sliver design, the camera packs great photo capabilities. Test pictures showed razor-sharp details, such as the brickwork of Brooklyn row houses or the leaves on trees in a neighborhood park. Dynamic range was also impressive: I could make out the features of brownstone houses under thick trees and also discern some details of cars on the bright, unshaded street.

The richness of colors was impressive as well. Photos of flower bouquets at a local market compared well to those from my sidekick camera, an aging but dependable Canon SD800 IS. The EX-S12 matched the Canon in nearly all cases except that deep-red items, such as a rose, had a hint of orange.

Indoor results were also great. The Casio's dead-simple manual white balance (just point it at something white and press the shutter) removed most of the orange-ish cast from photos taken under an incandescent light bulb. Even the automatic white balance was better than average, and in dim lighting, the high ISO (light-sensitivity) settings capture clean photos with minimal graininess or colored flecks.

While Dynamic Photo was a joke, some other effects worked well. I especially enjoyed multi-motion photo (introduced in a previous model last fall), which captures double exposures of people or objects in motion. For example, I held the shutter down as someone walked by on the street, and the camera produced a photo with multiple images of the man showing his trajectory across the frame.

The camera also captures HD video (720p) in the easy-to-edit M-JPEG/AVI file format.

What We Didn't Like: Though simple in concept, Dynamic Photo was a disaster in execution. The first step is to cut a subject out of a photo by taking two pictures -- one with the subject in a scene and one without. The camera discerns the cutout image (or video) by comparing the two photos to determine what 's been removed. Unfortunately, Casio's algorithms aren't up to the task. For one, they require high contrast between the subject and the background, ideally a dark subject on a white wall. Anything vaguely white on your subject may be recognized as part of the background and appear as a hole in the cutout.

Also, the system doesn't understand shadows. So after you remove, say, a wine bottle from in front of a white wall, the camera recognizes both the bottle and its shadow as missing and puts them both in the cutout. The instruction manual (hidden in a PDF document on a CD) tells you to avoid scenes with shadows. But how to you do that while photographing something in front of a white wall under the bright lighting that the camera requires in order to recognize anything at all?

As far as I can tell, the algorithm recognizes only rough outlines. When I photographed my roommate's black dog, Pixie, in the kitchen, the EX-S12 removed the white wall behind Pixie but not the white tile floor visible between her forelegs.

And these were the best results I got. In most cases, the process failed completely. If Dynamic Photo worked, even crudely with most snapshots, it would be a fun trick when you are out with friends. But the intricate setup required just to get mediocre results kills any spontaneity. It's more trouble than simply learning the composting features in a photo-editing program.

The Bottom Line: If you're looking for Photoshop in a camera, keep searching. But if you're simply hunting for a good pocket camera, the EX-S12 will please with its ultraslim profile and strong image quality.

Price: $250