Well there’s a place where two worlds collide
The pile of stone against the pull of the tide
You can stay with your feet on the ground
Or step into the water, leave the dry behind
-genesis

Yesterday I was actually out playing with my new camera, the Optio W60. Yeah, I know. . I’ve been more than disappointed with their customer service AND I’m not all that pleased with the durability of previous Pentax Optios.  What they do well though is simply take the best photos.  So what are you to do?

Since my last Optio blew up I needed to find another on water camera.  I spent the summer road testing the EcoShot as you’ve read.  There is a lot good to say about the Sealife Ecoshot.  It’s very well built and very tough.  There were some menu glitches I didn’t like but nothing that I could’nt work around.  However the images themselves were not quite where I wanted to be.  The dark tones and vignetting produced some interesting shots, but sometimes I didn’t want interesting.  In fact as I mentioned in that review, I can add “interesting” in photoshop but I can’t always remove it.

As I prepared to send the Sealife Camera back I had to make a choice.  Buy the Sealife or something else.  I looked at the Olympus quite heavily as well. It looked ok but I could’nt get my hands on one for a good test.  In addition I didn’t like the memory storage.  xD picture cards & MircoSD are just not common enough to work with my other gear.  Add to that a 10 second limit on video recording time and you have some deal-breaker drawbacks for paddlers.

So suddenly I was back to the enemy I know, the Pentax Optio.  Well, the new W60 was redesigned and in theory is tougher and more water resistant.  There is definitely a change in the way the battery cover works.  I don’t know that it’s any more solid than the old one. Still, the camera is supposed to go to 13 ft for up to 2hrs now which is much better than the old versions.  We’ll see.

At 10mp the camera does produce nice shots.  Of course that was never a problem for the Optio.  The W60 produces clean shots with a good color balance and contrast right out of the box. Of course  it improves once you customize some of the settings.

There are plenty of new features like blink recognition, smile recognition (obviously it does not work on me!) and all sorts of other things you probably want to shut off.  However it now shoots widescreen video & photos at 1280 x 720 pixels which is  comparable to HDTV resolution at 720p.  Widescreen video is limited to 15fps so it can get jittery.  Still there are occasions when it works well in my testing.  I love the widescreen photos.  Especially when I can easily slip them into my video work without additional editing.  You can also shoot video at 30fps but only at a 640×480 res.  The Optio of course let’s you keep “filming” until your SD card is full.

Another feature I like on the new optio is the settings memory that allows me to keep settings stored after the camera is shut off.  This is very important on the water.  Often when paddling you need to heavily customize your settings for the light, glare and shadows that always seem to fight with you on the water.  With the older versions you’d lose all your settings each time you shut off the camera.  With the W60, you can tell the memory which settings are important to save.  Then you needn’t worry if the camera powers down while in your pdf.  You turn it on, and the most recent settings are back.  Lots of frustration avoided there!!

Now the thing is. I have no idea how long this new Optio will last.  I certainly don’t trust it.  I will be much more careful with it; Drying it off as soon as it comes out of the water for instance. . .  I may not trust the quality of the camera, but I do trust the quality of the images. In the end that’s what matters. Well, to me anyway.

Read a detailed overview from Steve’s Digicams.

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