Pentax Optio S4i

October 31st, 2004

In the spirit of Halloween and setting the clocks back, Mother Nature must have been in a better mood today. After about a month of overcast days, the sun finally decided it would be a good day to poke it's head out, and it was the perfect time for me to go play my new digital camera.

I got the camera a few weeks ago, but really haven't had a chance to play with it too much. The camera is a Pentax Optio S4i, the smallest full-featured camera I could find. The camera is a 4 megapixel unit, and I outfitted it with a 1 gig SD card, good for about 4000 pictures at 640 x 480 and 356 shots at 2304 x 1728. The camera measures just around 3.3" w x 2" h x 0.8" d and weighs a measly 4.2 oz with the battery. It's so small and light I picked up a Danier leather card case so I can throw it in my pocket and carry it anywhere.

My first shots were just walking around the neighborhood taking pictures on the "fall colors" setting. It did a really nice job as you can see from the picture of Yellow Tree on the right (Yellow Tree lives outside my window and is home to a couple of squirrels, I'll try to get some pictures of the Flsquirrels sometime). If you click it you can see the original, but be warned, it's 2.5 megs and will overflow all of the edges of your screen. You can also view the entire "Yellow Tree" collection at my Flickr page.

I also got some close-up shots. This shot shows a close-up of my keyboard from about 12" away. I wish I had a tripod, because at this level of zoom every little shake of my hand was multiplied 1000 times. The size of the camera doesn't help either, it's just really hard to hold it still. The detail is amazing though, click for the enlarged version and you can see the dust and grime between the keys, these things are indistinguishable to the human eye in the real world.

All in all I've very pleased with the camera, it does everything I wanted, and I can fit it in my pocket with ease. Next I'm gonna try to figure out how to use the movie feature.

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