I'm looking for a pocketable digital camera to use as a P&S for when we aren't using the *ist D and that my wife is comfortable using. It's first trip will be the beach in Mexico and I'll probably carry it on a lot of bike rides in a sweaty jersey pocket, so the new generation of water resistant cameras is tempting. That leaves me with two options: Pentax 33WR, or Olympus Stylus 300/400 (same camera, different resolutions).
Has anyone on here used the Pentax 33WR, and what do you think? There are few reviews of this camera so it is hard to find good tests of the image resolution and other particulars. Both of these cameras are almost strictly P&S with no manual controls. They both use scene modes though, which are almost as good as manual controls sometimes if you understand what the scene modes are doing. The Pentax is better here because it has more scene modes, manual focus, and histogram display. My worry with the Pentax is that it has a tiny little lens. The samples that I've seen are okay, but not great. There is no lens cap, which means that I'll always be cleaning condensation off of it. The Olympus lens is marginally slower (f3.1-f5.2 vs f2.8-f4.9), but seems to be more substaintial. It does pretty well in resolution tests compared to other P&S digital cameras, with the exception of corner resolution. Pentax appears to have longer battery life and uses standard AA batteries compared to the Olympus's propreitary rechargable. It also uses the more common SD memory compared to the Olympus Xd. Anyway, I'd like to hear comments from anyone who has used one. Even though this is a Pentax list this isn't the normal subject of the list, so feel free to reply to me directly. alex
