Pentax Optio W60

Noise
Shoot a picture of a solid-color wall in low light, with a nice high ISO and look at the result. See all those speckled, grainy imperfections? That’s image noise, electronic imperfections caused by shortcomings in the camera’s digital systems. Every camera, and every photo for that matter, has some image noise, but some models are much noisier than others. Hence, the lab tests.

Noise – Manual ISO (10.21)
The core noise test entails shooting the well-lit color chart at the full range of available ISO settings and having Imatest analyze the percentage of noise in the resulting images. When a camera has a user-controllable noise reduction system, we test with the system on and off. The W60 doesn’t let you turn the system on and off but, looking at the lab results, the camera is clearly attempting to keep noise under control through some statistical manipulation.

We’re impressed with the noise performance here. It starts out, at ISO 50, just a hair above 1% noise, a very good figure for a point-and-shoot camera. After reasonable increases at ISO 100 and 200, the noise goes pancake flat from 200 to 400, and after another jump at ISO 800, maintains nearly the same performance at the camera’s top ISO 1600 setting. Being able to pump up the ISO to gain shutter speed in low-light situations, without paying a hefty price in additional noise, is a good thing.

Auto Noise (0.66)
The Auto ISO test is more about digital smarts than actual noise testing. We set the camera on Auto ISO, where it decides on the setting based on metered conditions. We shoot the color chart and run the noise analysis. The difference between success or failure here is how well the camera picks an appropriate ISO setting. The W60, sad to say, did as poorly as it possibly could. We pointed it at a well-lit chart, one that could be shot successfully at ISO 100 or 200. At its default setting, which lets the camera choose any value from ISO 50 to 800, the W60 consistently chose 800. When allowed to choose an ISO up to 1600, it chose 1600. We’re guessing the engineers decided to pump up the ISO to provide a nice, easy-to-handhold shutter speed, a valid consideration. In this case, though, at the default Auto ISO setting, the camera shot our chart, lit to a bright 1700 lux, at ISO 800, shutter speed 1/100 second, aperture f/5.5, noise 2.38%, score poor.

Low Light (5.88)
Photographic flash is a wonderful tool when you really need it, but there’s no arguing that the blast of a flash radically changes the look of what you’re looking at, not to mention the mood of the room. The better the low-light performance of your camera, the less you’ll have to resort to artificial lighting. And with a camera that’s geared for underwater as well as surface photography, that low-light rating is even more important.

We have two testing set-ups for low light. And interestingly, after the Olympus 1030 SW defeated our efforts to conduct both tests successfully, the Pentax Optio W60 confronted  us with exactly the same problem.

Our first test was easy enough to run for both cameras. To check color accuracy and noise levels at varied lighting levels, we light the color chart in four steps, from 60 lux (roughly the same as a well-light indoor room) down to 5 lux (about the illumination you’d get from a single candle), shooting at a highly light sensitive ISO 1600 setting.

The results at the three higher light levels were mediocre but not awful. However, when we hit the dim 5 lux lighting, the W60 basically threw in the towel, producing images with color far from the original and overwhelming noise levels.

Our second low-light test requires shooting at a range of shutter speeds, from 1 to 30 seconds, and analyzing the results. Unfortunately, the W60 (like the Olympus 1030 SW) offers no manual control over shutter speed, making accurate testing impractical. When set to ISO 400, the camera set the shutter speed to 1/4 second and produced an image nearly as far off color-wise as the disappointing 5-lux image in our light level testing, with over 3% noise. However, since we couldn’t conduct the full long-exposure test, this result isn’t factored into the overall score.

Pentax W60 Low Light Scores

The key factor here is the comparison between the two underwater-friendly cameras, the Pentax and the Olympus. On this test, the Olympus performed exceptionally while the Pentax results are only so-so.

Still Life
In every review we shoot two stock still life scenes we created, one featuring  our perpetually happy couple, the other a tiny Rosie the River figure and her colorful  companions. The photos are shot in program mode, under standard fluorescent lighting, at each available ISO. Clicking on the small images below will open the full-size originals, but keep in mind that these are large files and will take awhile to download.

Video Performance (3.85)
Movie recording is available at a variety of settings, including a widescreen 1280x720 (limited to a choppy 15 frames per second), 640x480 (at 30 or 15 fps) and 320 x 240 (again at 30 or 15 fps). There is also a dedicated movie mode for shooting underwater, which shifts the white balance to handle watery conditions. We conducted our video quality tests at the 640 x 480, 30 fps level.

We test two key attributes of video performance: color accuracy and resolution.