Pentax Optio W10 Easy Camera Review

Who needs a waterproof camera? After all, we moved out of the ocean a few million years back, and most of us don’t spend that much time in there these days. But a waterproof camera can be useful, whether for photographing your baby's bath time fun or for taking photos at the beach. The Pentax Optio W10 is just such a beast. It is waterproof to the JIT class 8 standard, which means it can be used underwater to a depth of a few feet. You wouldn’t want to take it to the Titanic, but it’s good enough for scuba diving and skinny dipping. This classification also means that it is dustproof because the waterproofing seals won’t let sand get kicked into the SD card slot.

 

But while the W10 may be a big man on the beach, it’s a 40-pound weakling when it comes to the images it captures. In our tests, we found oversaturated, inaccurate color, with blues and reds in particular looking garish and overblown. There was plenty of detail in the images but much of this was due to the heavy post-capture sharpening that the camera does. While this does produce sharp images, it limits what you can do with the images afterwards since oversharpened images won’t look good if you try and tweak the images in an image editing program such as Photoshop.

 

Noise was also a problem on images taken in low light situations. Increasing the ISO setting to its maximum of 800 or using shutter speeds slower than a tenth of a second lead to large amounts of grainy, irritating noise in images. While the W10 might be fine for a sunny day at the beach, it wouldn’t work well for the fireside beach party in the evening.

 

 

The W10 was a slow camera in a number of other ways, too. It took over 3 seconds from pressing the power button to being able to take photos, and the delay between pressing the shutter and the actual image being captured was around 0.6 seconds. That’s way too long: both will lead to lost shots.

 

The design of the W10 is attractive. It looks something like a soap bar with rounded corners, and the camera fits well into a pocket and the hand while shooting. The back of the camera is dominated by the large 2.5-inch LCD screen. This screen is bright, but the poor 115K pixel resolution meant images looked grainy. It was also difficult to see the LCD in bright sunlight which is a problem for a camera that’s designed to be at home on the beach.

 

The controls and on-screen menu of the W10 are also well designed; both are easy to use, and the four-way control next to the LCD screen is large enough to be comfortably used with the thumb. 19 shooting modes are on offer, ranging from the usual suspects (landscape, night scene, portrait, etc) to the more specialized (pet, candle, kids). This is a good balance since most of the modes are useful, and it doesn’t take an age to find the one you need. They are all presented on one screen, so you can easily scroll around and choose the one you want.

 

Movies are captured at a maximum resolution of 640 by 480 and are saved as Quicktime files, so they can be easily imported to a PC or Mac and edited. The movies can be shot in black and white or sepia toned mode (as well as conventional color). However, the mono sound that is captured with the movies is pretty much unusable. The microphone captures an annoying buzzing sound from the focus mechanism of the lens.

 

The W10 is a mixed bunch. Tthe camera is well designed and easy to use, but the image quality is disappointing. If you don’t mind compromising image quality for convenience and the water and dustproofing, then it’s a good pick. But if you aren’t a beach bum, then go for a similarly priced, non-waterproof camera like the Canon PowerShot SD600 that will deliver better photos.

Pentax Optio W10 Compared to the...