Pentax Optio W60
Digital Camera Review
Sep 16, 2008
- By Steve Morgenstern
2
The Pentax Optio W60 is meant to be your foul-weather photographic friend, oblivious to water (whether a splash or a full-on immersion) and freezing cold. You wouldn't know it at a glance, though - the 10-megapixel W60 is as sleekly styled and pocketable as any non-ruggedized compact camera. You do pay a premium price for weatherproofing, though, at $329.95. After running the camera through our complete suite of lab and field testing, we like the W60 for snowboarders and poolside pleasures, but the lack of manual controls and slow shooting performance are concerns. The full review follows.
| Top Point & Shoot Cameras |
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Picture Quality / Size Options (
5.80)
The 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor, with 10.34 total pixels, delivers 10.0 effective megapixels. Available resolutions are:
10 M
|
3648 x 2736
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7.5 M
|
3648 x 2056 (16:9)
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7 M
|
3072 x 2304
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5 M
|
2592 x 1944 |
| 3 M |
2048 x 1536
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| 1280 |
1280 x 960 |
1024
|
1024 x 768
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640
|
640 x 480
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Three compression levels are provided, Best, Better and Good. We were unhappy with the fact that Better, described in the manual as “suitable for viewing the image on a computer screen,” is used as the default setting, and imposed with no flexibility in the ultra-simple Green Mode, rather than the Best setting, which is more print-friendly.
Picture Effects Mode (4.75)
A variety of editing and picture effects functions are available during playback, with the option to overwrite the edited file or save a new version when appropriate. These tools include:
Shake Reduction: attempts to remove blur from low-light images
Resize: change image size and/or compression
Crop: a variety of crop sizes and positions are available
Rotate: available rotation positions are previewed in thumbnails on screen
Digital Filter: effects include B&W, sepia, color shift (red, pink, purple, blue, green, yellow), color extraction (red, green, blue), soft filter, brightness adjustment, fish-eye
Frame Composite: overlay image of frame on a photo (over 80 designs are available)
Red-eye Compensation: automated fix
While taking photos a panoramic image capture option is available, which automatically stitches together up to three horizontally panned images in the camera. A ghost image of the edge of the previous shot appears on-screen to aid in aligning the next shot. There’s also a special-purpose panoramic mode called Digital Wide. You take two shots in portrait (vertical) orientation, and the camera stitches them together to mimic the frame proportions of 35mm camera, though the final image is limited to 5-megapixel resolution. We found the panorama process worked very nicely, creating nice clean connections between handheld images in under a minute.
It is also possible to shoot with a picture frame overlay while taking pictures, but the option to add one later seems much more practical.
