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