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Pentax Optio S12 compact camera

Compelling upgrade?

These features work in all shooting modes, which wasn't the case with the S10. Shutter speed ranges from 1/2000 to 4 seconds, and the selectable ISO range is from 80-1600. The Optio S12 will also shoot Divx movies in 640 x 480 (VGA) and 320 x 240 (QVGA) at 30f/s. There’s also a handy 21MB of internal memory.

If you used a Pentax camera before, this camera will feel like an old friend, and if you’re not familiar with the brand, it will soon feel like a new friend because it’s very easy to get to grips with. Switch it on, and the Optio S12 is shooting in next to no time. Switching between the different modes is a doddle, and Pentax uses a mix of icons and text descriptions to guide you through the various options.

Pentax Optio S12 compact camera

Aimed at those who prefer point-and-shoot

The tabbed menu lets you make changes to the camera mode, such as the image quality, and the camera settings - for example, date and sound. Anyone pressing the wrong button can simply use the green button to get back to the original camera settings. There’s really not a lot of scope for a great deal of creativity with this camera in terms of manual control, but then again, this is very much aimed at the point-and-shoot brigade. In that respect, the Optio S12 more than delivers the goods.

The large LCD screen gives you lots of information if you want it, but it was very difficult to see things when shooting in bright sunlight. Yes, we know that all LCD screens suffer from this problem, but the Optio S12's screen seemed worse than others. The Optio S10 had the same problem. It would have been handy if Pentax had provided an optical viewfinder as well.

In terms of performance, the Optio S12 delivers pretty good pictures, but we have to confess that we really didn’t see any improvement over the S10, even when images were printed out. The downside of having a 12-megapixel camera is that the files are larger and so it takes longer to write data to the memory card.

Next page: Verdict

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