WATERPROOF PENTAX OPTIO W60 SHOOTS DEEPER, WIDER AND AT COLDER TEMPS

GOLDEN, CO (May 22, 2008)…PENTAX Imaging...

I've been in the glossy garden mag photography for years and only a few demand RAW....

All the res from film or efilm (digial back - medium format, what ever) will still produce the same quality print in a mag....The mag printing quality only goes so far before the rest is unable to be utilizable - again printing separations.

How fast is the lens on this camera? F2.8 or better is my minimal standard. At F2.0 I'd be really interested. So many of these cameras are too slow for heavy shade or overcast days or dawn/dusk without the flash, and the flashes are very limited.

The camera has apertures of F3.5-5.5 depending on the conditions.

The sepcs can be found at

H2O Camera

I got this information from a seminar last year by Barry Beck, who along with his wife Cathy form the team that provides a majority of cover photos for fly fishing magazines. I guess it needs updating.

You are right, it looks like some magazines are now taking other lossless formats such as TIFF or EPS. It still does not change the fact that these point and shoot cameras cannot be used for most of the major fly fishing magazines because these point and shoot cameras save their photos only in JPEG format (a lossy format which loses some photo information), not TIFF and not EPS. You can save a JPG file as an EPS of TIFF file in Photoshop, but they still cannot be used for most magazines such as FlyFisherman because they require that the color scheme be CMYK, not the RGB color format used in JPEG images

CMYK = Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and BlacK

RGB = Red, Green, Blue (the color format used by most computer screens)

FlyFisherman 2008 Photographic Requirements

Should be saved in TIFF or EPS format, not JPEG, and must not contain extra channels. The color space should be CMYK or
Grayscale. The maximum ink coverage (C+Y+M+K) should be no more than 300%. The effective resolution of images should be
between 250 and 400 dpi. Images should not contain embedded transfer functions or halftone screens. Do not use ICC profiles
or other color management.

The end result of this argument is still the same. You need a camera that also saves photos in a lossless format, not just JPEG format.

RGB can be converted to CMYK with good results if your an experienced color manger....

What do you think they did before the high rez-RAW images in CMYK were available? I've had many images printed that were 2.1meg-jpg that print half pages beautifully in national mags, of course this was back in 01/02. I now have a pro camera, but you just can't beat the underwater feature of these pentax cameras.

You are more than willing to dunk a couple of hundred, but not $10,000

You guys want to speak in English?

I can see a couple of problems right off. I have the Olympus720SW that is also waterproof and is the same size. It has two main drawbacks for me.

There is no viewfinder to look through while aiming. Trying to see much in the screen when it is bright, wet or not ideal is difficult. A see through viewfinder would be a big help.

Also all of the setting are electric and need to be set through the screen. Again, if you can't see the screen well it is difficult to change settings. Add in a huge selection of possible settings and things take way too long. If you need to go from Scenery or portrait to underwater (common for fishing) it becomes a major endeavor. A manual knob to change settings would some much faster and simpler to use.

As far as picture quality, they are not as good as some of the older point and shoots for the simple reason they do not have a telephoto lens. All of the enlarging is done digitally and the quality suffers.

Well I am in a process of buying a camera. Well I cant decide between Pentax W60 (possibly will go for this one) or Olymous 1030Sw or 1050SW.

Help me choose !!!

That's not true of the W60, and the main reason I bought one last month before my San Juan/southern Colorado fly-fishing trip. Alone among the waterproof digitals I have looked at - mainly Olympus and Pentax - this model does have a modest optical zoom, not just the essentially worthless digital zoom that most digital cameras have and which produce fuzzy pictures much like your computer will do with them.

Fly2Fish is correct, the Pentax Optio W60 has 5X optical zoom (meaning non-digital zoom). The Olympus Stylus 1030SW has a 3.6X optical zoom. Please research these things before posting them.

As far as the optical viewfinder goes, neither the Olympus nor the Pentax waterproof models have them. The W60 and the 1030SW do have newer larger, brighter screens, however, with wider viewing angles. Older models like the Olympus Stylus 720 SW and Pentax Optio W10 had screens that were not as bright or visible in direct light. If you want a viwefinder, you will have to select another non-waterproof digital camera. Nikon seems to include viewfinders on a lot of their cameras. I have had good luck with them.