Pentax Optio WG-2 Digital Camera Review

Sharpness

The WG-2 struggles with image sharpness. Most cameras have soft spots in their lenses—usually between the center and the edge of the frame at the wide-angle setting. But the WG-2 is pretty fuzzy across the entire zoom range in just about every area of the frame. Vertical sharpness is notably crisper than horizontal, but the net effects is always a bit blurry.

The WG-2 improves slightly on the sharpness of last year's WG-1, but falls short of the other tough-cams in this comparison. More on how we test sharpness.

Image Stabilization

The Pentax WG-2 doesn't have optical image stabilization, but the digital stabilization it does offer is reasonably effective. We measured about a 47 percent improvement in sharpness with the SR Pixel Adjust mode activated. The downside is that all of the "stabilization" is actually just extra image processing; it doesn't occur in real-time like optical stabilization does, so it slows down the camera's shot-to-shot times.