Like most compact cameras, the H10 is good through ISO 200 in respect to noise. However, photos always looked overprocessed and soft at full resolution at all ISOs and benefit from some sharpening either after they're shot or by increasing the in-camera sharpness setting. (Though, this doesn't help the overprocessed part.) At ISO 400, subjects start to look more soft and smeary and pick up some noise. There's some color shifting, too, so bottom line, it's not the best for great high-ISO shooting.
If you're after a lot of fine detail and are doing a lot critical analysis of your photos at full resolution, then you don't want the H10. On the other hand, those after good photos for small prints and Web use and not doing a lot of heavy cropping will likely be happy.
Taken at ISO 64 (24mm, 1/160 at f3.2) you can see the overall image quality is soft and can be helped by some extra sharpening. It did make a nice 4x6-inch print, though.
There's some noticeable barrel distortion on the left side of the lens at its widest position (top) and slight pincushion distortion when the camera is fully zoomed out. The lens's center sharpness is fairly good, but does soften out in the corners. Purple fringing wasn't a huge issue, but is visible in high-contrast areas of photos.
If there's one thing I liked about the H10's photos, it's its colors (at least at ISO 400 and below). They were close to accurate in our tests, but still came across nice and vibrant. The H10, like most compacts, tends to blow out highlights. It does have a feature to optimize dynamic range, but it only helped so much.
So here's an example of Casio's Dynamic Photo feature. On the far left is a picture of CNET associate technology editor Joseph Kaminski. First, I took a picture of him standing against a white wall, then the camera asks you to take the picture again, but without the subject. The camera then does its best to clip the subject from the background. It's nothing that can't be done in Adobe Photoshop, but it does it quickly in camera.
Once you've created the clipped image, you can go back through other photos you've taken, such as the one of me in the middle, and add in an extracted subject. The result is the Dynamic Photo on the far right. Though this was done with a still subject, the camera has options for extracting moving subjects from a series of 20 shots taken at lengths of 1, 2, or 4 seconds.
