Casio Tryx sample photos

The regular, plain ol' automatic snapshots from the Casio Tryx are good to very good, but it's such an unusual camera that it's difficult to give it an overall pass/fail grade on photo quality. The camera seems targeted at people looking for something better than a smartphone or camera phone with photos suitable for online sharing. At that, it succeeds.

With plenty of light you'll get pleasing color, good exposure, and nice details. Once you have to use ISO 400, though, you'll get subjects that are soft and smeary. Noise and noise reduction increases above that,too, making photos less useable for cropping and larger screen and print sizes. For Web use and small prints, however, the high ISO results are OK (though I'd stay clear of ISO 3200 as subjects are just too soft even at small sizes).

The Tryx does have several shooting modes that take advantage of its high-speed sensor and processing to improve different things such as dynamic range and low-light performance, so what you see in this slide isn't the whole story. But, if you're the type to leave it in auto, I would probably skip this camera. Also, pixel peepers will likely not be happy with the photo quality regardless of shooting mode. Overall, the Tryx is a better fit for those looking for a secondary camera to have fun with than as someone's one-and-only pocket camera.

This is a 100 percent crop of the inset photo. Taken in Auto mode set to ISO 100 you can get very nice portraits with fine detail good enough to stand up to heavy cropping and/or larger prints.

However, if you shoot a portrait using the camera's Premium Auto mode it will apply skin softening to clean up fine lines and blemishes and even out skin tone. Unfortunately it's so heavy handed that it makes faces look soft and somewhat out of focus because everything else in the frame is sharper.

For those that like to shoot close-ups, the Tryx can focus as close as 3.1 inches from a subject. If you can keep the ISO low (this is at ISO 100), you can get decent detail shots. In general, though, I wouldn't pick this up for regularly shooting macro photos.

With the exception of neutrals, colors are not terribly accurate from the Tryx. If you like vivid and bright colors, though, that's what you'll get up to ISO 400. Above that sensitivity (i.e. in low-light conditions) colors start to look duller and washed out. Exposure is generally good, though highlights will blow out (the high dynamic range modes can help with that). The auto white balance is warm indoors, but good outside, plus there are a bunch of presets and a manual option if you want to fine tune it.

With it having such a wide-angle lens, the Tryx does have barrel distortion. Center sharpness is good, but there is noticeable edge and corner softness that's especially visible at larger sizes.

Fringing in high-contrast areas of photos isn't unusual with wide-angle lenses, so it wasn't a surprise to see the bright purple glow around these windows. On the upside, this is an extreme example (it wasn't regularly this bad) and you can see it on screen in time to correct your positioning to try and avoid it.

There is no optical zoom on the Tryx, which will likely turn a lot of people off. It does have a digital zoom that will fire off a bunch of shots and combine them into a higher-quality digital zoom photo than you'd get from the average point-and-shoot. You won't want to look too closely at the photos at larger sizes, but you can get closer to your subject.

One of the key features for the Tryx is its HDR Art mode. Basically it takes a series of photos at different exposures and combines them into one photo for an artistic effect. The mode has three settings to increase or decrease the effect. From top to bottom: Off, 1, 2, and 3.

Here are a few examples of the results you can get with the HDR Art mode. It can be a lot of fun to play with, but how long that fun lasts really depends on how much you like the effect. Take a closer look.

Stuck in the Best Shot modes is a standard HDR option, which makes little sense since it's the one you're more likely to use for regular day-to-day photos. It takes a shot at a normal exposure as well as ones that are over and underexposed and combines them into one photo that's more evenly exposed. The top photo was taken in Auto mode, the bottom using this HDR mode.

The Tryx has a panorama mode that lets you quickly take 360-degree horizontal or 180-degree vertical photos by pressing the shutter release and sliding the camera left, right, up, or down. If you take a look at this photo at full size you'll see there are some stitching problems and it really doesn't like moving subjects. However, that's common with this type of panorama creation making the mode best suited for scenes without moving subjects.