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| Jim1348 |
Posted - 06 déc. 2010 : 23:54:24
UPDATED : review now available on the portal : Reviewed - Casio EX-H20G Camera with HybridGPS
I looked at the forums, but I couldn't determine another more suitable forum. Anyway, I don't follow cameras much, but this might be of interest to some GPS enthusiasts!
http://www.casio.com/products/Cameras/Hybrid-GPS/
http://www.casio.com/products/Cameras/Hybrid-GPS/EX-H20G/ |
| 15 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 14 juil. 2011 : 06:54:55
Welcome to the forums.
Yes I had touched on that in my review, I'd found a problem with the way the zoom works, namely with the lack of "over-zooming", apparently they haven't bothered fixing it... |
| jtjohnson |
Posted - 14 juil. 2011 : 03:00:36
I'm trying to set up my new H20G. Everything seems to work with one major exception. The battery is charged, memory card install, I can take pics, etc. But when I turn on the GPS function, I connect to the satellites, and the map shows what looks to be my location. The problem is that the scale of the map is about 25 miles to the inch. The scale bar on the top-left of the screen is locked in on the second increment, and the zoom-in/zoom-out control has no effect on the details of the map. Seems to me I should be able to zoom down to, what, within 10-20 meter radius, but there is no zoom at all. Is it me, or is the some camera malfunction? Also, am I supposed to download the firmware update to where? My desktop? My memory card or ?[ed] Thanks. |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 23 juin 2011 : 22:49:17
Yes, you can't beat personal testing, but if you haven't read it yet, you should read my review closely http://www.gpspassion.com/fr/articles.asp?id=283 - it's got objective comparisons, both for GPS performance and picture quality. |
| zava |
Posted - 23 juin 2011 : 09:04:24
Not any specific improvements.
I read reviews a few months later than those posted here and both lenses and GPS were rated "above average"; I also saw mentioned a log refresh rate (with camera ON) of about 2/sec which would be very good for my purposes but seems quite unrealistic for a general purpose GPSr (logs will grow huge with such a sampling rate). I saw several requests for free sampling rate setting but I am not aware if Casio did it.
I am tempted, but I am getting mixed impressions... maybe I should buy online, test, then decide...
On the good side, prices apparently dropped quite a bit. |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 22 juin 2011 : 21:13:09
Welcome to the forums.
Yes not much discussion unfortunately, probably a sign that it's not a very popular camera, and based on my testing it's not hard to see why. The optics are terrible and the GPS integration is poor, at best, with logging close to useless. Have you read anything about firmware upgrades that may have improved the GPS part? |
| zava |
Posted - 22 juin 2011 : 21:06:51
Hello Everyone,
I see nobody wrote more on the topic since a few months...
After some time, some test ans some firmware upgrades, how's the situation with this camera?
In particular I am interested, of course, in the H-GPS: what's the effective accuracy indoors and how fast is the track log sampled?
I am considering the camera for mostly indoor usage (tracking World War I tunnels...) so a high sampling rate and good accuracy are mandatory.
Anybody can share some opinion about indoor performance?
Thank you! |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 27 déc. 2010 : 19:21:32
Review now posted on the portal : http://www.gpspassion.com/fr/articles.asp?id=283 |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 19 déc. 2010 : 22:15:28
How is your testing going ? can you zoom out in map mode? Anyone else with the camera now?
Did some side by side testing yesterday on foot in downtown San Jose with the Visiontac V900 datalogger and I can't say I'm impressed with the resulting log of the Casio EX-H20G in comparison as seen below. The EX-H20G is in yellow and the Visiontac in red. I have a separate screenshot of the Visiontac to make the patch I followed more visible.
A few comments :
- The Casio has some random "jumps" that make the log hard to understand. I haven't tried cleaning it up, but that shouldn't be expected of the user.
- I purposefully walked through the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel (top center/right where there is a pool, blue line on v900 capture) to see how it tracked indoors with its sensors...well it doesn't seem to track at all.
- The Visiontac's track was close to the followed path overall, except inside the hotel of course and also when I exited it, likely because I was between tall buldings with a lot of multipath problems and stationary (merry go-rounds). At that spot, the sensors of the EX-H20G do seem to have helped stabilize the position
- the other good news is that the geo-tagging of the pictures was usable for the most part, both the position and the angle of view, even when no log was recorded, see the picture below (viewed with Geosetter). So maybe there's something wrong with the logging feature...
 |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 17 déc. 2010 : 02:44:08
What's wrong exactly with the GPX that gets created ?
I agree we need more settings for GPS recording, I was hoping to deactivate the auto-sleep to get a point every 10 seconds, but oddly while there is a "never" for the screen "Sleep", "Auto Power Off" maxes out at 5min...looks like a bug.
About D.2 above (no zoom out in map mode), do you have the same problem ?
As for the optics/picture quality I don't think I have unrealistic expectations, my first Digicam was the Canon Ixus S100 in 2000 with about 10 since and I'm all for the "compact camera I can take everywhere" concept (I recently broke down and got a DSLR, the Sony A500) for indoor pictures) but I'm really taken aback by the very low resolution of some pictures at full zoom, frankly it's not acceptable, they look like they were taken with a plastic camera!
I did some side by side comparisons and as seen below it turns out the picture is ok at wide-angle, the colors are better than on the HX5V too (picture 4), the problem is really at full zoom, not sure at which point it gets bad, will have to investigate :
Full Zoom 100%
Full Zoom Resized
Wide Angle 100%
Wide Angle Resized
Forgot to mention above that like on the HX5V, the macro focusing is not great compared to the TZ-7, you can't get very close even with the "SuperMacro" that can apparently go down below 7cm. |
| normanjp |
Posted - 17 déc. 2010 : 01:30:38
Very nice review! I would not be so hard on the optics and picture quality. For good pictures outdoors nothing beats my Pentax K7 18-250 zoom and a Hoya circular polarizer compatible with digital cameras. I use Casio cameras for at least 10 years in addition to my DLSR, especially when asking other people to snap our picture and when it is inconvenient to carry a big and heavy DLSR. Before buying the EX-H20G, I used EX-S12 and EX-S200. As I do not like cameras making too much beeps and playing music, Casio cameras are a good choice.
My biggest problems with the camera EX-H20G pertain to the functionality of the Hybrid GPS. This new, so Casio may introduce new functions in new releases of the firmware. I hope that Casio is reading this forum or that someone will forward our comments to Casio.
1. The GPS log cannot be deleted. It is only deleted when you go to Map button, Menu button, Output Log, Save.
2. You cannot save more than one log per day as the name of the file is YYMMDD.KML A new file saved on the same day will overwrite the previous file without warning.
3. You cannot set the frequency at which the points are saved to the log. If the camera is off, the point are saved every 10 minutes and when the camera is on, they are saved every 10 seconds.
4. The format of the KML file loads in Google Earth without problems; however, this file cannot be converted to a decent *.gpx format that can be uploaded without problems into my favorite program for creating annotated geo-positioned trips: @trip PC by Mobile Action Technology. I tried GPS Visualizer, GPSies, and gpsbabel. Any suggestions are welcome. |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 16 déc. 2010 : 21:07:30
My EX-H20G has arrived ! Seen here next to my Sony HX5V with GPS too :
A. "General" comments:
1. Pretty tall but thin, should make it easy to carry along
2. Feels "plasticky" compared to the Sony HX5V or Panasonic TZ-7, makes it lighter too...
3. Massive 1950mAh battery, compared to the 900mAh batteries of the HX5V or TZ-7 that can't last a day of day of "intensive" shooting. There shouldn't be any problem here and with the extra battery (OEM for $10) you can likely use it for several days.
4. Powers up quickly, faster than the Sony. Someone had mentioned 10 seconds on Amazon which got me worried but it's more like 2 seconds !
5. The LCD is marvelous, very bright and shows lifelike vibrant colors, much better than the Sony.
B. Photo/Video comments :
1. The commands are easily accessible thanks to the "BS" (Best scene) button, there is Auto, Premium Auto (nothing to pay, just more processing time!) and many other modes
2. The "Slide Panorama" to make a continuous panorama on the fly works well. Unlike the same mode on the Sony it does a full 360 and you can stop when you want without having black bars. There is a shutter noise (the Sony is like a movie) that could make it conspicuous in a quiet environment. The manual seems to say you can use it in vertical mode but I haven't found the setting for that yet. Unlike the Sony it doesn't "correct" for moving objects.
3. The Sony has a handy HDR mode (takes and mixes two pictures for very contrasted scenes), I haven't found that mode, and the Premium Auto does not seem to use it.
4. There is an SR mode (Super Resolution) that bumps up the zoom to 15x (360mm equivalent) and seems to do a good job. It will help get that extra reach without post-processing with a computer
5. There are two video modes, HD (1280x720) and VGA (640x480) with only one setting for HD and it's high-bandwidth (the Sony and Panasonic have two settings, high and low, I find low is good enough and saves a lot of space)
6. The video output can be toggled between NSTC (North America/Japan) and PAL (Europe)
7. As a side note, the demo pictures for the "Best Mode" scenes look identical to those on the Casio QV-4000 camera I had in...2001 !
C. GPS specific comments :
1. The first lock took a few minutes indoors (wood frame house)
2. Subsequent locks are very fast, under 30 seconds in my house, maybe 15 seconds outside, the background position update every 10 minutes certainly helps with that.
3. Tracking seems excellent on foot, not sure if they are correcting the raw GPS position with sensor data on the fly, but the brief walk I took in the park was spot on (see below), will do some more testing in a more challenging environment with an MTK logger.
4. You can't see the latitude/longitude without taking a picture.
5. The GPS position is displayed in the DDMMSS.ss format, DD.ddddd would be more convenient.
6. There is no overzoom in map mode, even if there aren't any detailed maps available for the area it would still help to see the pictures on the map, with a 1 mile resolution here, the map view is fairly useless.
D. A few problems :
1. The optics don't seem to be on par with those of the Sony and Panasonic, the purple fringing is well managed byt the resolution appears to be low in my first test pictures. I'm the first one to be "doubtful" when I see Leica (Panasonic) or Zeiss (Sony, although I checked my HX5V and can't see the Zeiss name this time) on the lense, but they must be doing something right because the resolution of the Casio across the zoom range is poor on detailed scenes (foliage for instance) and very poor at full 10x zoom, especially in low light. Could also be due to aggressive noise reduction or the way the stabilization works. More testing required.
2. can't zoom out in map mode, this must be a bug as the zoom command works fine.
Well that was longer than I planned ! |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 14 déc. 2010 : 21:58:02
Got your kml and it's not working for me either with gpsvisualizer, the gpsies .gpx works fine though. I'll pass on the .kml to Adam from gpsvisualizer to see if he can see something wrong with it and hopefully put a workaround on his site for direct display. [UPDATE : Adam took a look and found the icon URLs had line breaks in them, gpsvisualizer had been modified and kml's are now working!]
I can't tell from the manual if there is a way to view your current GPS position in lat/long? That could be handy in some situation ? I did find this interesting table in the manual that shows the type of positioning you'll get :
 |
| normanjp |
Posted - 14 déc. 2010 : 13:37:15
It seems that the Casio Exilim EX-H20G log (track) in *.kml format has some problems. I tried to import it into Garmin's BaseCamp and got the following message:
Import Problems
The following problems occurred during the import: File contains no GroundOverlays
Comments? |
| gpspassion |
Posted - 14 déc. 2010 : 04:45:05
Yes, that's not something "normal" trackers can do, I'd also like to see it help when the multipath problems get too sever and the position jumps around. Sorry to hear you're having trouble with gpsvisualizer.com - I just gave it a try and map appeared after a few seconds, feel free to send me your tracks on gpspassion [@] gmail.com to see if I can get it to cooperate. |
| normanjp |
Posted - 14 déc. 2010 : 03:26:28
Unfortunately, no map was shown in GPSVisualizer although I waited several minutes. When I clicked the link to the EveryTrail website, a map appeared with all points shown with pushpins as waypoints.
The stats look a bit strange, so maybe Casio has a problem with writing the log information to the *.kml file - this function was just released a few days ago. Anyway, using GPSies to convert the file to *.gpx allows me to import the track to @trip PC. I may import several tracks to a trip on http://www.a-trip.com, so I may create a comparison of at least 4 different trackers that I use. Your comparisons are very nice, but the important feature of the Casio would be to continue tracking without satellites. We shall see how this works. |
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