Casio Exilim

» see exilim.casio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

For about ten years there was a normal thing that no longer exists: you left the house with a phone in one pocket and a camera in the other, and they had nothing to do with each other. The camera was small enough that carrying it was not a decision. Casio is the company that made it that small.

The Exilim EX-S1 arrived in June 2002 at 11.3 millimeters thick and 86 grams without the battery, carrying a 1.3 megapixel sensor behind a fixed 37mm-equivalent lens. Casio's marketing name for it was the Wearable Card Camera, and the comparison was literal, since the body was roughly a credit card with a lens in it. Everything else on the shelf that year was between 25 and 35 millimeters. A twin model, the EX-M1, added an MP3 player.

By 2004 every other manufacturer had a thin line, which is the clearest evidence that Casio had actually changed something. The Exilim range split into the Card series at the bottom and the Zoom series above it, with a Pro line of bridge cameras off to one side. All of them charged over a dock rather than a cable, which is a small detail that dates a photograph of a desk from that decade instantly.

~ the case file ~

~ the specification arms race ~

Casio kept winning specific numbers rather than the general argument. The EX-Z1000 in April 2006 was the first compact digital camera to hit ten megapixels, at a point when ten megapixels on a sensor that size was closer to a marketing claim than an improvement. In 2007 several models added H.264 video, with recording deliberately capped at ten minutes across the EU and several Asian markets because customs tariffs treated a movie camera differently from a still camera.

The genuinely interesting line was the high-speed one. The EX-F1 in 2008 shot sixty full-resolution frames per second in burst and 1200 frames per second in video, at 336 by 96 pixels, which is a resolution you have to squint at but a frame rate nothing else at that price could reach. The EX-FH20 and the FC100 carried it on. For a while, if you wanted to film something breaking in slow motion without a professional budget, you bought a Casio.

~ the postmortem ~

None of that mattered against the thing in everyone's other pocket. The compact camera market collapsed as phone sensors became adequate, and adequate was all that was needed for a category built on convenience rather than image quality. Casio's camera division lost around 500 million yen in the fiscal year ending March 2017, and the company concluded there was no path back to either growth or share.

Production stopped on 24 April 2018. Casio did not sell the business or license the name, it simply stopped, which is unusual and slightly dignified. The company still makes watches and calculators, neither of which the phone has finished absorbing yet.

~ what got buried with it ~

What died with Exilim is not really Casio's product line, it is the shape of a decade. Turkey in the 2000s ran on this: the camera came out at the table, everyone leaned in, and the pictures reached other people days later over a USB cable or not at all. The dock and the proprietary battery and the SD card you had to remember were friction that the phone removed completely, and nobody misses any of it in a practical sense.

The residue is a strange one. Those small 2000s sensors have a specific noisy look that a modern phone spends enormous computational effort avoiding, and there is now a secondhand market of people paying real money for exactly that. A camera that was sold on being thin is being bought for the way it fails.

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