Out of the box, the first thing that struck me about the Optio S40 was its diminutive size. It's about the length and width of a credit card and has 9 icons on the dime size control wheel. I was a little overwhelmed by the abundance of icons since my Kodak Easy Share CX6200 has only three. Skipping the instruction manual on the Optio S40 was not an option.
I have a year of experience with the Kodak Easy Share. Therefore, I hoped to figure out the features of the S40 without much effort. However, this camera is not Plug and Play. It's more like plug and pause.
The first snafu occurred when I loaded the batteries and got the message 'battery depleted' on the camera screen. I loaded three sets before realizing that the sliding battery door was loose. The contacts were not tight against the batteries. This continued to be an intermittent issue.
With juice at last, I found some cool features. You can change the instant-review time. This is the time allowed to show your family the great shot you just took. Many cameras default to a frustrating 5 seconds. The menu screen can also be enlarged for easier viewing using the zoom button.
The options for fine-tuning image quality, recorded pixels, white balance, focusing area, sharpness, saturation and contrast are remarkable. A photo connoisseur will love the nitty-gritty adjustments this camera allows. The S40 has 11MB of built-in memory.
This camera also has a setting for me, 'easy mode.' Hallelujah! Just a twist of the wheel to the smiley face icon and I was off. I took 25 photos of my family and was anxious to see the quality delivered by this 4.0 effective megapixel, 3X optical zoom camera.
However, my enthusiasm waned quickly. I loaded the Pentax ACDSee 5.1 software and connected to my PC via USB. I turned on the camera and got plug-in errors and a message that 'ghostscript was missing.' What was truly missing was my patience as I reloaded the software. After 20 minutes of tinkering, I gave up. I ended up taking the memory card out, putting it in my Kodak and copying the images to my PC.
I should have guessed that there would be PC connection issues when I saw the 42 page 'PC connection manual' included along with the 129 page 'operating manual.'
I was impressed by the crisp focus, vibrant colors, contrast and clarity of the photos. However, the Herculean efforts required to solve software issues threw a pail of water over any embers of excitement I had about image quality.
Bottom line, the Pentax Optio S40 is not the digital camera for me. If you want the high-quality photographic equipment Pentax has delivered for 50+ years, pick a different model.
