Pentax Optio WPi

The Pentax Optio WPi is a camera you can bring almost anywhere, almost anytime. It is small, compact, and waterproof! (up to 5 ft for 30 minutes). Wrap it in the optional silicone rubber skin and it’s also reasonably rugged, too. It’s got good camera specs too: 6 megapixels, 3x optical zoom, and 2″ LCD monitor. The picture quality is pretty good. At the default setting, pictures are on the soft side but this can be adjusted easily. Quite good enough for snap shooting use.

This is the second of the “h2o cameras”. The first being the WP. The W10 was already available when I got this camera then but decided to get the WPi because of its slightly more compact size and lower price. As of this writing, the WP and the WPi have been discontinued and the W20 is out.

One gripe I have with the WPi is that it doesn’t have an autofocus assist lamp and thus does poorly at focusing under low-light conditions. Good thing there’s a manual focus feature. Another is that water drops sometimes sticks onto the lens, causing smudged pictures. But that’s what you get for using a camera in wet conditions. You just have to wipe the lens before taking shots.

Rating: 4/5