Product Reviews

The Optio S6 is a little camera with some big specifications. Weighing just 120g with its battery, it's the lightest camera we've ever seen. At 52mm its height isn't quite record breaking, but this is as tall as it needs to be to accommodate the whopping 2.5" LCD screen. The screen's 232,000-pixel resolution is twice that of the screens in most cameras, including other 2.5" models we've seen.

The interface that Pentax uses for its compact cameras is one of our favourites. It has the usual dedicated controls for flash, macro, self-timer and scene presets, but extra buttons swap their duties to

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access whichever functions you most commonly need. As a result, the camera is quick to use, and you'll rarely need to delve into the menu screens. The other options are plentiful, but there's no direct control over aperture, shutter speed or focus.

Video is recorded at 640x480 pixels and 30fps in DivX format, which provides excellent quality video in small files. The S6 can pack 22 minutes on a 512MB SD card at the maximum quality setting. We expected the MPEG Layer 2 audio format to record high-quality video soundtracks, but it was prone to distortion and clicks.

The camera includes basic video-editing tools. More useful is the ability to adjust photos after they've been taken, which is ideal if you're printing without the help of a PC. However, we found high-contrast and low-light photos needed brightening up too often. Even Night Scene, with its four-second exposure time, tended to underexpose shots. Otherwise, image quality was impressive, with natural colours and none of the sharpness issues we've seen on some Pentax cameras.

The S6's tiny design means it's very tempting, but the ultra-compact Casio EX-S500 (What's New, Shopper January 2006) is more appealing.