Pentax Optio W60 – First impressions

I haven’t had it long so this isn’t a full review, but my new digital camera arrived the other day so here are my first impressions.

After some deliberation over which waterproof digital camera to get I chose a Pentax Optio W60 as a second, go anywhere camera to compliment my Canon EOS 450D SLR camera. It looks nice, its just the right size to slip into your pocket, but isn’t so small that it is difficult to handle and the buttons become too fiddly. It doesn’t look waterproof which is nice, the styling is just like that of any other compact digital camera, and although I haven’t tested its waterproof capabilities yet, it is supposed to be fully waterproof. I shall be out snorkelling with it if its nice at the weekend.

The LCD on the back is large and bright and easy to view, even in bright sunlight and the operation is simple. As a man I played around with it before reading the manual and managed to work out all of the options and settings without having to revert to the manual once. I did subsequently read the manual and find a few little features that I had overlooked, but nothing major.

Photo quality is good too. It does suffer from a fair bit of noise at high ISO, but so do most cameras and it tends to up the ISO quite quickly in low light when in automatic modes, but this could be over-ridden if needed. I shall have to investigate the best modes to use for keeping the sensitivity low and adjusting the shutter speed / aperture first. Talking of modes, it has loads of them! All the normal presets modes such as full auto, program, portrait, sports, night are available and a host of others such as underwater, pets (you even have to tell it the colour of your pet!), food and text! It also has a built in panoramic mode that allows you to take three photos and the it stitches them together for you within the camera. I’ve tried this out and it seems to work pretty well and saves time in Photoshop later.

Panoramic photo stitched in camera

Panoramic photo stitched in camera

It also has face recognition, smile capture and blink detection. All of which are very clever, although once again I only played with these and haven’t used them in earnest yet. Other things to play with will be the high speed continuous shooting and the time lapse photography feature. It does of course record video as well.

So far so good, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. As a 2nd camera to compliment my SLR then it is ideal. Small, rugged and versatile, just what you need from a camera that can go everywhere with you and with a little bit of experimentation it will produce high quality images as well.

7 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author Katie Parsons says:

    Thanks for review Alan & hope Jon’s knee is okay.

    • Avatar forComment Author Alan says:

      No problem. Jon seems to be fine. As far as the camera goes, then all of the photos and the helicopter video footage was taken with my Pentax Optio W60 so it is working well. The whole point of this camera for me was so that I could take it out on the hills and the sea with me so that I almost always have a small, rugged but capable camera with me. It seems to be performing well and thanks to its form factor is more often than not in my pocket ready for action.

      The only negative I have about it so far is the battery life is a little short. Not a problem most of the time but you do need to charge it whenever you can.

      Al.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Avatar forComment Author

Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

You may also like...