With everyone talking about virtual reality, camera manufacturers see the opportunity to provide their own perspective, with a range of innovative capture devices appearing from all sides.
Casio is the latest company to join the fray, with the announcement of the EX-FR200 camera, a ruggedised and flexible device to tackle your wide-angle needs.
Now, Casio is a little limited in distribution these days, so we can’t be sure if this camera will appear outside Japan where it has been announced, according to the translation from DP Review.
The EX-FR200 presents a fish-eye lens unit with a separate controller. The two can be connected to offer a conventional (albeit wide-angle) camera arrangement, it can be configured for selfies so you can look at the display and peer into the lens, or they can be separated, offering remote control.
Where some devices offer a camera controlled by a smartphone, Casio’s solution appears to be similar, but providing the controller with a 3-inch touch display.
Coming back to 360 video, one of the interesting aspects of the Casio EX-FR200 is that you can combine camera modules in back-to-back fashion, just as you can with the Kodak PixPro SP360, which will let you produce video compatible with YouTube 360 Video.
The FX200 lens itself has a 13.4mm (equiv) wide angle lens, with F/2.8 aperture and its fixed focus, good from about 40cm out to infinity. There’s a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor sitting behind the lens, with support for external microSD card storage. Casio says it gives you 185-degrees of capture.
A range of capture options are offered, with super-wide options and panorama, as well as a lot of video options, including panorama again, 4K and slow motion.
It talks to the controller using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, with a smartphone app offering a wider range of functions, although the controller/camera body that comes with it can act as a remote control too. There are also a range of mounting options so, for example, you could have the camera module on your head, and the controller on your bike handlebars.
As we said, we’re not sure if this device will make it out of Japan, available from mid-September 2016, but it’s another interesting addition to the world of 360 capture.
Source: pocket-lint.com
