The camera you can fit in a tin! (Pentax Optio S)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Pentax Optio S
Date:	03/11/09 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tiny, well built, more features than you might expect

Disadvantages: Fiddly buttons, small screen, battery life not great

As the old photographer's adage has it: "what's the best camera? It's the one you have with you" - meaning that there's no point in all the DSLR quality in the world if you leave it at home because you don't want to carry the bulk. The Pentax Optio S does not have that problem: it might not have been the very first camera which could reasonably have called itself an ultra-compact, but it was certainly among the earliest to be both a technical and a commercial success. Dating from 2003 as it does, it's naturally showing its age a little now, but it remains a good enough camera that I carry it with me frequently simply because of its size.

That smallness was remarkable on the camera's release, and remains impressive now. There are plenty of pictures around the web showing the Optio S fitting neatly inside an empty Altoids mints tin - never included as standard, sadly; it would have been a great advertising gimmick! - and it's also almost exactly the same size (depth apart) as a credit card, but a more formal measurement gives figures of 83 x 52 x 20 mm. It's very light as well: ready for use, complete with battery and memory card, the whole thing weighs just 115 grams; most other cameras weigh considerably more than that completely empty!

To deal with a few more practicalities: the Optio S accepts standard SD cards (though not SDHC), so there are no problems in that department. The battery is a tiny proprietary Li-ion model, with the designation D-LI8, which unavoidably suffers a bit from its capacity of just 710 mAh but which recharges in well under an hour. These batteries are still easily available: at the time of writing Amazon seller had them for £21.99, but as long as you exercise the usual eBay precautions you can pick one up there for less than a tenner. You might want a spare in any case, as it's not all that long lasting: 100 shots is good going.

When I first got my Optio S, I spent some time simply turning it on and off to watch the lens expand and retract. Pentax's sliding design allows the lens, when the camera is active, to protrude further than the actual depth of the camera, which is quite an impressive sight! Its motor is not the smoothest, and the barrel moves with a slightly irritating whine. It's a run-of-the-mill 3x optical zoom contraption, which has no hidden special features up its sleeve but with a few exceptions (see below) does its job competently enough. The tiny flash isn't too bad for its size, though it's hardly best in class, but the 1.6-inch LCD does seem smaller than that number indicates and requires some squinting in remotely bright light, especially when using the menu system, which if only the print were larger would be very clear indeed.

You'd think that a camera this small and of this vintage would be lacking in features, but in fact the reverse is the case. You don't, it's true, get the full manual control of aperture and shutter speed that you do in a few of its contemporaries, but this is a little more than a basic point-and-shooter. You get a live histogram, for a start, albeit only in monochrome. Sharpening, contrast and saturation can be set from the camera. There's a two-stage macro, spot metering, and an option to select which settings you want to keep at power-off: with this, you can even make the camera return to the same zoom it was on before! There's also manual focus, although the diminutive size of the camera means that this is even more of a fiddle on the Optio S than it is on most compact cameras.

There are downsides, naturally. Those tiny dimensions mean that the buttons are very small indeed, and this problem is worst when it comes to the four-way controller, which really should have been larger than the *one centimetre* diameter it actually boasts. The ISO range is disappointing, with a maximum setting of only 200; yes, higher values would be noisy, but sometimes that's better than getting no picture at all. And there are also a few utterly ridiculous features which add very little to the usefulness of the camera, foremost among them a "slimming filter" setting which does nothing but squishes the picture in from the sides!

Build quality is very good: unlike most cameras in its class, the Optio S is made from aluminium alloy rather than plastic. This does mark fairly easily - my camera has several small scratches and dents - but somehow it still retains its good looks. An exception to this praise is the battery/memory card door (annoyingly, if expectedly, the two are stored in the same compartment) which is held to the camera body by no more than a flimsy strip of flexible plastic. The buttons, although very small as already mentioned, are not too uncomfortable - with the exception of that four-way controller - unless you have huge hands, and they have a nice, definite action.

Finally, and most importantly, we come to the matter of photo quality. The Optio S does seem to me to have compromised on this somewhat to achieve its tiny size, although it has to be said that Pentax lenses of this era tended to be uninspiring and somewhat lacking in quality. Certainly, a Canon A75 - a much bulkier camera, but with the same resolution - produces better pictures. However, apart from a disappointing level of barrel distortion and a slight softness at the edges, the Pentax's pictures aren't too bad, with nice bright colour, and would certainly do for snapshots or web use.

I would only recommend you buy an Optio S if the smallness is something you would find attractive - but if you do, then go for it. It is not the best camera in its resolution class in terms of picture quality, and that whining lens motor can be a serious annoyance after a while, but there are very few other cameras of this age that are genuinely comfortable to carry around in a trouser pocket. As to price: naturally you will have to buy this second-hand, but a solid if not pristine example with a good battery and charger included should not set you back much more than £20.

(3.5 stars, really, but bumped up to four because the smallness and lightness really is impressive.)

Summary: An excellent take-it-everywhere-just-in-case camera

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