Casio just gave a simultaneously cool and really weird press conference. They’ve shrunk the famous EX-F1’s guts into a nice compact little package, then demonstrated what they said was going to be the next generation of photography. I would tend not to agree.

Still the shrinking of the high-speed camera is a fantastic thing. It has roughly the same capabilities as the EX-F1 (30fps instead of 60 for stills, and 1000fps instead of 1200 for video, but still) but is waaay smaller, like normal-size slim point-and-shoot size. They hadn’t turned on the lights when I was taking shots so sorry if the flash is a bit overbearing. I’d like to give a shout out to the official Engadget guy who was flopping around in front of everyone else, getting in all my shots. Thanks, dude!

Kazuo Kashio himself then demonstrated what they said was going to be a revolution in photography. He took a short movie of a model on a white background presenting a box, then proceeded to show how it could be “composited” onto a “background.” In other words, the newest generation of Casio stuff does basic photo compositing, essentially magic wanding your photos a million times for you. Revolutionary that’s not, I’m afraid. They didn’t even show the process! Come on! He then continued to show photo composites for like 15 minutes straight, explaining every time how it was revolutionary. I stayed till the end, but half the room had left by then to get the free watches they were giving away outside. They literally gave away the last one to the person in front of me. These are the tribulations I go through for you, reader. You would have had yourself a giveaway if things had gone differently.

The high-speed point and shoots are the FS10 ($350), which has a 3x optical zoom, and the FC100 ($400), which has a 5x optical zoom. Both have 9 megapixels and shoot video with reduced amounts. We’ll have more info in a few minutes, and video of the weirdness as well.

Check out the gallery below — it’s in reverse chronological order because of the way I selected the things in Aperture. You like that?

Photo Gallery by Picturesurf