Pentax Optio V20 : tiny smart camera

published : Friday, March 21, 2008 | model : PENTAX Optio V20

Theme : Digital Photography | Compact digital camera

Pentax is doing some catching up with other brands implementing many intelligent technologies in their compact digital camera lines. The Pentax Optio V20 is a good example of how smart a digicam may be.

Pentax Optio V20 Digital Camera

Amazon

249.95 $

RitzCamera.com

268.75 $

cameraworld.com

268.75 $

WolfCamera.com

268.75 $

PhotoAlley.com

268.75 $

Yes, the Pentax Optio V20 is quite smart. But it also takes pictures ! It offers an 8 megapixels resolution and a nice optical zoom of 5x corresponding to a 36-180mm. That is quite versatile but we had loved to hear that Pentax had stabilized this lens. ISO setting can be set from ISO 80 to ISO 6400 in order to freeze moving subjects but we still have doubt on the image quality at such an extreme ISO setting. The new screen of the V20 is a large 3" TFT with a wide angle of view of 170° but the resolution remain the same as all 2,5" ones : 230 000 pixels.

Smart technologies embedded in this Optio V20 start with the automatic scene detection which tunes the camera with the right parameters depending on the kind of scene the camera has detected. It can see that the scene is a macro, a portrait, a landscape or a sport scene and put the program on the right scene mode. That works quite well on the new Lumix TZ5 we have reviewed lately. The autofocus may now track a moving subject and it offers the "smile Capture" which automatically shots when it detects a smile on your subject's face. Face detection is also quite powerful as the "face priority" mode may detect up to 15 faces on the image. For wide views lovers, the V20 has a digital wide angle setting and a panorama mode. Suprinsingly, the video mode is a bit too traditional to our taste as it offers a simple VGA resolution with a nice 30 fps though.

The Pentax option V20 only weights 140 grams fully loaded and should be available everywhere around mid-April 2008.