Pentax Optio W80

Shooting Modes (12.00)

The W80 has a wide selection of shooting modes, including two automatic modes and 23 scene modes. The two auto modes are the Auto Pict mode (where the camera selects the best scene mode to use) and the green button mode, which puts the camera into a fully automatic mode. In addition, there is a standard Program mode that allows the user to shoot automatically, but to tweak many of the settings.

Missing from this list is a full manual mode: there is no way to directly set the aperture or shutter speed on the W80.

Auto Mode Features

Focus – The auto focus of the W80 was fairly speedy, but not always successful. In low light, it sometimes failed to find a focus point, even with the help of the AF illuminator. Most of the time, though, it performed adequately, and we found that the facial recognition feature worked well enough.

One feature that we did like was the 1cm macro mode of this camera, which allows it to focus down to a distance of 1cm for getting up close and personal with small objects.

Exposure – The W80 allows you to tweak the exposure settings in program mode; you can add or take away up to 2 stops of exposure. In addition, the camera can automatically take 3 bracketed exposures at the right level, minus one stop and plus one stop. You cannot, however, widen the bracketing range or take more than three shots.The W80 also includes a D-range setting, which tries to expand the dynamic range of the camera by bringing in more shadow and highlight detail.

Metering – The usual options of evaluative, center weighted and spot metering are available in the program shooting mode.

Aperture – The W80 has a very limited aperture range: at both the wide and telephoto ends of the range it has a range of just f/3.5 to f/5.5. There is also no manual aperture control.

Shutter Speed – The W80 has a reasonably wide shutter speed range, though; from 1/1500 of a second down to 1 second. In the night scene mode, This can be expanded to 4 seconds.

Self-Timer – As well as the usual 10 and 2-second self timer delays, the W80 also offers an interval timer mode that can take between 1 and 412 shots at intervals of between 10 seconds and 99 minutes apart. That means you could take a series of time-lapse photos over up to 28 days.

In addition, a smile detect shutter option is included, which only takes the photo when it detects the subject smiling.

Scene Modes

As well as the automatic modes, there are 23 scene modes available. These include the usual modes (portrait, landscape, etc) as well as a few more unusual ones, such as half-length portrait and digital wide, which composites two photos together to create a short panorama.

Picture Effects (3.00)

A selection of picture effects are on offer in the W80. Some of these are shown below. These effects can be applied after the image is captured, and the image is saved as a new file. That means that you aren’t stuck with the effect if you don’t like it.

Picture Samples
Original Black and White Sepia Vignetting Soft Fisheye More...

Manual Controls (6.50)

Options are available for auto, daylight, shade, tungsten, fluorescent and a custom white balance setting. The custom setting measures the white point of a white object in the frame.

Drive/Burst Mode (4.00)

The W80 includes two burst modes: a continuous mode that can shoot to the capacity of the card at the maximum resolution, and a high speed mode that takes up to 8 shots at a lower resolution (5 megapixels) at a speed of about 2.9 frames a second.

Shot to Shot (1.92)

We found that in the continuous shooting mode, the W80 was able to shoot about 1.2 frames a second. That’s a little slow, but we don’t typically see high speed from compact cameras.