Digital Camera Carnival: Pentax Optio W10

Lynne Kiesling

Glenn Reynolds is hosting a digital camera carnival, with further entries today or Friday.

In August I replaced my 6-year-old Nikon CoolPix (2MP, with a nifty rotating lens for self-portraits) because it has huge refresh and latency problems. Not a big deal for holiday snaps (grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more ...) [sorry, the Monty Python elf just took over there for a second-ed.], but very problematic for sporting events. This summer the KP Spouse snapped quite a few pictures of me on the bike way at the edge of the picture, or running just behind a lightpost ... so the latency is a large problem for that. It's also a problem for snapping pictures of kids and animals.

I chose the Pentax Optio W10 6MP. 6 megapixels, wow, the color and clarity in its pictures is impressive for a point and shoot! It has all sorts of settings, a large screen on back, a relatively slim profile, on-board memory as well as a SAN disk slot, interoperates well with the computer, the printer, and the iPhoto software. It also handles low light situations well.

But the two features that made me choose it are:
1. It has a sports setting. It will also take video, and you can take stills from the video as photo shots too.
2. It is waterproof. Great for snorkeling and kayaking photography. In fact, our gonzo whitewater kayaker buddy who's also an ace photographer says that this camera is the bee's knees for kayaking action photography.

We have yet to test the waterproofness of the camera or its lack of latency, but I am otherwise thrilled with it so far. Here's a recent photo taken with it (and some bonus cat-blogging, too!), of the KP Cat sitting in my home office ("the lair") and supervising me while I work:

My lair does not have a lot of ambient light, and the old camera didn't do such a good job up there. This one does a much better job. This is a lot of camera functionality for the money; I anticipate getting 6 years out of this one too!