Pentax Optio WP

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

A stylish camera that can swim with the fishes.

We all know how beautiful everything looks with a few pints of beer inside you, but have you ever wondered what the world looks like from inside a pint of beer? Well, now's your chance to find out, with the world's first beer-proof camera, from Pentax. Simply set the self-timer, focus on your mates and drop it into a pint of your favourite ale.

T3 can exclusively reveal that everyone looks a bit stretched and blurred, with lager adding a warm yellow tinge, bitter giving a cosy reddish feeling and Guinness turning everything black. A bit like drinking the stuff, really, but without the constant trips to the loo and blinding hangover.

Officially, the WP has JIS Class 8 protection, repelling all manner of dust and letting you shoot for half an hour at a maximum depth of 1.5 metres, making it ideal for snorkelling, ski slopes and beaches. It's smaller, tougher and lighter than Pentax's previous waterproof offerings, even verging on elegance with its two-inch LCD and slim 22mm metal and plastic body. The buttons are necessarily plasticky but easy to use, with a handy green button that you can reprogramme to your favourite function.

The 3x optical zoom lens is fine for everyday snapping and it's good to see 10MB of internal memory for when your card fills up. Beyond that, there isn't a huge amount of photo geekery in the Pentax's five-megapixel toolkit - just a choice of scene modes and the ability to tweak sensitivity, white balance, colour and focus. The manual focus is useful as the WP's autofocus system gets confused underwater, and you should always use the flash for best results beneath the waves.

Cool digital features include continuous autofocusing in sports and pet mode (you can even specify light- or dark-furred cats or dogs), and a recover function to restore recently deleted images. A red eye editing option reliably eliminates glowing eyes from portraits you've already shot - and there'll be plenty of those if you're shooting in the pub.

Picture quality is about what you'd expect from a cheaper 5-megapixel compact - sharp and colourful enough in bright light, but soft on real detail and a touch dull and noisy in low light. Movies are average, shooting 320 x 240-pixel clips at a healthy 30 frames per second. But how many cameras are as happy splashing in the surf as they are knocking about the pub? A fantastically flexible camera at a bargain price.