camera reviews listing
Pentax Optio 33WR by _Nod
Links
specs on dpreview.com
examples on pbase.com
OK you may think me slightly crazy to buy this so soon after my Nikon, but I had the opportunity to pick it up relatively cheaply on eBay and couldn’t resist.
As far as the functionally goes it has everything the 3700 has and more. It has time lapse, but you are able to set a start time and the interval goes down to 10 sends rather than 30 seconds with the Nikon 3700. Anyway, I digress as interval shooting doesn’t have much application when it comes to tossing.
As far as I can see there are three main advantages to this camera:
1. The rugged exterior and relatively good build quality, the camera feels like it might be able to cope with the odd small knock, not that I want to find this out for real!
2. Water resistant, this has come in handy a couple of times, namely when I was experimenting with sparklers, the ground was quite wet, but I didn’t have to worry about putting my camera down on the ground so it was quickly to hand once I had the sparker set up and lit.
3. Internal focusing and zoom, as mentioned in my Nikon 3700 review the external lens mechanism seems very delicate, this simply isn’t a worry with the Optio as it’s all internal!
Another thing worthy of mention is the Optio's multi-shot mode, where the camera takes four successive images in the one frame. The four images are spaced nicely to get interesting results for day time tosses. The Nikon also had a multi-shot mode, but this is 16 frames as opposed to the Optio's 4, this means the individual photos are a little too small and the camera will be taking shots long after the toss is over.
One more thing – If you press the shutter button while in review mode the camera swaps back to shooting mode, as far as I know there are very few p&s cameras that do this and after having the functionality on my 10D, I really appreciate it on this camera too.
Over all I’m very happy with this camera, it has some great functionally that I wouldn’t expect to get in many other models in the same range, the menus are easy to understand, the build quality is good and I have no complains over the quality of the photos. So in short- a great camera for tossing as well as every day use.
camera reviews listing
