Mon - February 5, 2007

Pentax Optio W20 Waterproof Camera Review, Tips, and Sample Photos



Ross Alford from Australia posted a review of Pentax Optio W20 together with many useful tips, his typical camera settings, and sample pictures. He calls it "a brief review" but you can learn from it more than from "professional" reviews in photo magazines.

I am using my Optio W10 quite intensively, but I have managed to explore just a fraction of camera settings and modes. So, it is very interesting for me to see other photographer's experience with a similar camera. I noticed some differences between controls in my W10 and the newer W20 model. Below, there are a few notes I made from reading his review.

  1. He shoots almost entirely in P mode. I have the same shooting habits with my W10 camera. Of course, in addition to the P mode I use movie mode and interval drive mode quite often.
  2. Program the green button to do useful things. I am using two functions assigned to the green button: exposure correction and white balance setups.
  3. When shooting videos, put the camera into Pan Focus mode if shooting at medium distances (people doing things, etc), or use manual focus for macro or infinity. Avoid using autofocus or optical zoom during recording. Both AF and zoom motors will record annoying noise on the soundtrack. Also definitely use the electronic image stabilization, which works extremely well.
  4. The movies are recorded as QuickTime .mov files that contain a sequence of jpegs. So, this camera can be thought of as having a hidden ultra-high-speed mode that can take 30 still shots a second. I am extracting 640x480 still pictures from video shot with my Pentax Optio W10 camera, see video and still frames from the camera mounted on deck of the Sisson Nucleus kayak.
  5. When shooting macro, always use flash, set to soft mode, and set the ISO to 64. Shoot in P mode and use the button to the right of the OK button to set the focusing range to macro instead of using the "flower" picture mode. For vertical macro shots, remember to hold the camera with the flash above the lens.
  6. For most shooting (or more serious work except snapshots) Ross has sharpness set to low, and prefers to sharpen pictures using smart sharpen in Photoshop since camera sharpening sometimes produces halos. Contrast is set to low for the same reason since it is easy to increase it in Photoshop, but if it is too high as the image comes out of the camera, you can't recover the lost information. I still need to experiment with these settings and Photoshop processing.
I was going through Optio W10 manual when writing this post. I made a surprising discovery: I don't have panorama assist mode in my W10 camera... I got used to take panorama pictures with my older Optio WP.

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