Product Reviews

Pentax has crammed a bright 5x optical zoom lens into the small aluminium body of the Optio SV. At 165g including the battery, it is light enough to carry around in your pocket, but there's enough bulk to keep camera shake to a minimum. This is especially important when using the zoom at its maximum setting. It's not a great-looking camera, but it's comfortable to hold and all the buttons are easy to reach.

Behind the lens sits a 5-megapixel sensor which records images at a maximum resolution of 2,560x1,960 pixels. This is enough detail for decent prints up to A4 size. Images can be framed using either the

The Optio SV is an advanced camera that provides a lot of control over the pictures you take. Full manual, aperture priority and shutter priority functions are present and easy to use, while manual focus makes an appearance in the form of a stepped onscreen slider bar. This works surprisingly well, but is still not as intuitive as the mechanical ring focus control found on cameras with a protruding barrel.

Metering can be spot, centre or multi-segment weighted. All three methods often left images under exposed and requiring manual exposure compensation. Colours are recorded accurately, but the auto white balance setting struggled to keep them true under different lighting conditions. Manual control worked much better.

At £272, the Optio SV packs a good deal of technology into a small and affordable package. Amateur photographers will like its range of functions and the level of control more typically found in a bigger camera.