Find out what broke on the rugged, waterproof Pentax Optio W90 in the full review here.
Pentax Optio W90 Overview
The Pentax Optio W90 is the company's 11th generation waterproof camera, so you'd think they'd have it down pat by now. The W90 is shockproof up to four feet, waterproof up to 20 feet, dustproof, and coldproof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. A four foot drop is really nothing to boast about, especially since the Casio Exilim EX-G1 can endure a drop that's slightly taller than Shaq. The rest of the W90's rugged abilities are fairly average for a tough digital camera, but it was the compact's underwater image quality that really hooked us. Sgt. Perlman got a little too excited during the testing regime of the Pentax Optio W90, so watch the video to find out what happened.
Shooting with the Pentax Optio W90
The Pentax Optio W90 has a standard 12-megapixel 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor, 5x optical zoom, and 28mm wide-angle lens. These features are on the higher end of the scale for a compact, and the Pentax Optio W90's 720p HD video was a nice addition, even though it was Motion JPEG. The W90 is geared toward beginners, and the camera's basic set of shooting options makes that crystal clear. We did like the 1CM Magnification Macro mode, but most of the designated Scene modes like "Flower" and "Landscape" made little difference compared to manual selections.
The Pentax Optio W90 operated optimally in Underwater mode, both with stills and video. Our ISO levels reached 6400, thanks to Digital SR and a megapixel cut, and we got 32-Face Face Detection, a built-in flash, and 9-point Auto Focus. Image Stabilization was weak, due to the fact that it was limited to Pixel Track SR, and we could have used a resolution boost on the 230,000-dot, 2.7-inch LCD. For the most part, the Pentax Optio W90 was comfortable to shoot with and got the job done.
Pentax Optio W90 Still Image Quality
The curse of the consumer sensor is inevitable within the point-and-shoot realm, and the Pentax Optio W90 resides somewhere in the middle of the quality spectrum. When lighting was optimal, the W90 delivered, but as soon as the camera detected a drop in luminance, the quality took a fall as well. You'll see that in all of our low light images—droves of noise gobbling up the image like a piranha feeding frenzy. Luckily, the Underwater still image mode performed wonderfully, as you can see in our first samples. This was one of the best underwater performances we've seen out of an underwater cam.
No matter what the shooting environment offered, all of our HD videos were noisy for some odd reason. Perhaps the large resolution coupled with a small sensor had something to do with it? The processing? However, the underwater video mode was beautiful. One of our samples begins underwater and ends out of the water. The quality shift is uncanny when we look at underwater compared to the outdoors. If anything, the Pentax Optio W90 would serve as an excellent scuba cam.
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