The Optio E60 is Pentax's new ultra-low-budget point-and-shoot. It's a very, compact 10-megapixel camera with only the barest of features and settings, its appeal resting instead on extreme affordability. This low price manifests itself not just in the minimal features and controls, but in an overall feeling of cheapness. It's very light, has only a 2.4 inch LCD screen, and feels like it will fall apart under a stiff breeze. On the plus side, it has competent face detection, uses easy-to-find AA batteries, is lightweight for travel and won't cause exquisite agony if lost or damaged. The Optio E60 is priced at $140.
Auto Mode The E60's automatic mode, called Green Mode, is all-encompassing, and strips the user of any control. Even Program Mode, which is meant to allow at least a modicum of user choice, only lets you alter basic settings such as focal area, white balance and ISO.
Movie Mode
Movie mode offers two size choices (640 x 480 or 320 x 240), and two frame rates (30 or 15 fps), with electronic shake reduction optional.
Drive / Burst Mode The E60 has two levels of burst-mode shooting. First there's continuous, which takes photos as fast as it is able for as long as the shutter button is depressed, or until the memory card runs out of space. In our brief hands-on with the camera, this appeared to be approximately one shot every 1.8 seconds, not exactly speed-demon performance. There's also a mode called 16 frame shooting, which will take 16 shots over two seconds, but at the small fixed size of 640 x 480.
Playback Mode Playback mode has the usual bevy of editing and playback tools available (crop, rotate, resize, transfer, red-eye compensation, protect transfer and DPOF). You can also tint the image to one of seven colors or turn it black-and-white using the digital filter tool. Brightness filter lets you tweak the brightness level of the image and frame composite lets you overlay one of 27 framing graphic images over your photo. Finally, there's a feature called Recover that can recall accidentally deleted images.
Custom Image Presets The E60 has 17 different image presets, most of which are tried-and-true standards. There's program, night scene, night scene portrait, half-length portrait (automatically digitally zooms to the appropriate area, with a preset size of 3M), movie, landscape, flower, portrait, surf and snow, sport, digital SR (digital image stabilization), kids, pets (which lets you choose the color and type of your pet as long as you have a cat or dog), food, digital panorama, frame composite (with 27 frames) and voice recording.
