Pentax Optio W10

Auto Mode (7.5)
The Optio W10's Green Mode controls everything except the zoom setting: flash mode, focus mode, drive mode, ISO exposure – everything. Not all cameras are this thorough in automating their manual controls, and we can't think of any that are more completely automated. It's appealing that this mode is always easily accessible with the green button. It is a single-step process to get to the simple mode, a feature its users will appreciate.

Custom Image Presets (7.0)

Shooting Modes
Night Scene	Long exposures, with optional flash
Landscape	Increased depth of field
Flower	Boosted color without increased sharpness
Portrait	Decreased depth of field
Underwater	Adjusts color
Surf and Snow	Compensates for bright backgrounds
Synchro sound record	Records sound clip with shooting image
Pet	Can be set for light- or dark-furred pets
Candle	For low light and warm white balance
Kids	Stops action
Soft	Soft focus
Self Portrait	For taking hand-held self portraits
Fireworks	Long exposure at infinity focus
Sunset	Balanced for vivid colors.  The manual helpfully note that the mode also works for sunrises
Food	Bright colors with sharp focus
Text	For Shooting black text on white paper
Museum	Shuts off flash and noises where the are prohibited or rude
Natural Skin Tone	Optimal color for “faces”
Report	Adjusts resolution to 1280 x 960 for onscreen presentations

Drive / Burst Mode (7.75)
The Optio W10 offers two burst modes. High speed shoots at 3 frames per second until the buffer is full. At full resolution and highest quality, that's 5 frames. Regular burst writes each image to memory before shooting the next one, yielding 1.3 frames per second at the largest file size. The W10 also offers a self-timer with either 2 or 10 seconds of delay, and an interval shooting mode, which allows the user to set the interval between shots, the number of pictures to take, and the time at which to start taking them.

Playback Mode (8.0)
The Optio W10 has a range of options for reviewing and displaying images. For navigating through large numbers of images on a memory card, it offers a 9-up thumbnail mode, a calendar mode, and a folder mode. The calendar mode allows the user to navigate to particular dates. Folder mode is useful because the user can create, name, and choose folders on the memory card.

In full-frame mode, the OK button allows the user to choose the amount of image data superimposed on the display. The display can show file size, quality, parameters, exposure, file number and folder, capture date and time, and a histogram with highlight and shadow warnings. Users can enlarge the image up to 8x, which looks a bit fuzzy on the LCD.

The playback mode offers in-camera editing, including down-sampling images, cropping, adding a color tint, softening, adding one of three pretty goofy cartoon frames, fixing red-eye (which didn't work on a blurry picture of my dog), voice annotating, protecting, printing, and undeleting.

The W10's slide show function includes selectable intervals of 3, 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds, wide, checkerboard, and fade transitions, and sound effects.

Movie Mode (6.5)
The W10 shoots movies at either 640x480 or 320x240 resolution, and at 30 or 15 frames per second.  It saves the files as MOV files (Quicktime Motion JPEG) with mono sound. The camera can shoot color, black and white, or sepia toned movies. In our tests, the focusing motor’s noise pretty much spoiled the movies.

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Pentax Optio W10 Digital Camera Review Navigation
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