Pentax compact pulls out all the stops
Megapixels? Check! LCD display? Check!
Pentax today unveiled its latest compact camera, combining many of the features found on rivals’ snappers into one sleek point-and-click snapper.
Pentax's Optio V20: all the latest features
The Optio V20 is an eight-megapixel machine with a 5x optical zoom. Images are stored on an SD memory card. Pictures can also be viewed on the V20’s 3in LCD screen.
Pentax has built smile-detection technology into the V20, automatically closing the camera’s shutter when a smiling face is detected. The feature is currently flavour of the month with many manufacturers, including Sony and Nikon.
The V20 also features more established tools, such as face recognition and shake reduction.
The camera’s 6400 maximum ISO sensitivity is high, and various pre-defined image modes, such as Landscape and Food, are available if you don’t want to fiddle about with the picture settings.
Pentax’s Optio V20 will be available in the US from May for $280 (£140/€190). A UK release hasn’t been snapped yet.
COMMENTS
font shenanigans
My experience is the opposite of AC's up there: reghardware articles are beautiful while the rest of The Register is incredibly ugly. Not small, just ugly.
Specifically, ugly when viewed on Opera 9.x under Ubuntu 7.10. It's fine on Opera 9.x under Windows XP, and fine under other browsers. So great, it looks good on every browser except the one I actually use...
I was finally moved to investigate this. Reg articles include this in the HTML:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style_picker/layout" media="screen, projection" />
For Opera, this ends up loading the style sheet <http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/style/layout/opera.css>. Inside that we find:
body, textarea {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
background-repeat: repeat-y;
}
So it prefers Helvetica font to others. Apparently my Ubuntu installs don't have a valid Helvetica font because it looks like, well, Hell. Like an 8x8 pixel font clumsily blown up to to actual 20x20 or so font cell. I tweaked it to "Arial, sans-serif", and now things are beautiful.
To tweak: create "theregister.co.uk.css" somewhere, contents "body, textarea { font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important; }". Now right-click on an El Reg page, Edit Site Preferences...; give it the path to the file you just created. Reload page, it should be pretty.
El Reg could perhaps do this themselves when specifically coughing up a style sheet for Opera. The again, Opera ought to handle it better; and Ubuntu ought to include a decent looking font under the "Helvetica" name. Blame all around.
AC could chase down his size problem similarly. (Actually I believe I have some spam laying around here which claims to help with that problem, no wait, better get my coat...)
>Bela<
eyetest?
It's fine here. I'm running on a 14" laptop screen at 1400 x 1050 and have no problems reading the text.
@Anonymous
Register Hardware is The Register's sister site, it's not the same thing. We like smaller text here, they prefer it bigger.
You can always increase the text size using your browser.
Dammit - why miniscule print !!!
Not for the first time I'm lambasting "reghardware.co.uk" for the eye strain caused by miniscule sized fonts.
All the OTHER sections of Theregister.co.uk are in sizable fonts - why the f**k is this section different !!
