Pentax pops out the Optio W30 and A30

by Paul Miller, posted Feb 21st 2007 at 6:09PM

There's some heated competition already for our PMA eyeballs, and Pentax sure wants a slice. They don't have anything terribly outstanding on the consumer end, but these W30 and A30 Optio shooters still do pretty well for themselves. The A30 (pictured) takes a pretty traditional approach to the compact genre, boosting the megapixels to 10 and offering up 2.5-inches of LCD. There's also ISO 3200 and some fancy gyro-based shake reduction, along with face recognition auto focus and auto exposure, all in a pretty dang compact SDHC-munching body. The W30 steps it back a bit, with a 7.1 megapixel CCD and mere digital shake reduction, but the rest of the specs are there, along with a waterproof and dustproof housing that can handle being up to three meters under water for two hours. No word on price or availability for either camera, but we're sure we'll be finding out soon enough. Peep the W30 after the break.

[Thanks, David N]

Read - Optio A30
Read - Optio W30