Pentax Optio A10 Digital Camera

I bought this camera for my wife and I because it is extremely compact (about the size of a deck of cards). It has some user control but also a lot of built in modes and automatic point and shoot capability. So if you like to experiment you can, but if you just want to point and shoot you can. The best feature is the DivX video encoder. This means you can take alot of video with this camera. Similar cameras take video in MPEG2 format and use up memory at approximately 1.7MB per second. This will fill a large SD card very quickly, but DivX is MPEG4 compression, so the quality of the video is about the same, but it takes up much less memory. On a 1GB SD card I can get about 47 Minutes of video. Also they make some DVD players that can play DivX files natively so you can simply burn the .avi file onto a DVD -RW and play it in the DVD without having to reencode it into DVD movie format. DivX is also easy to play on your computer. Low light pictures manually setting the exposure to ISO400 and no flash look surprisingly good. I am very happy with the photo and video performance. The only problem I have with this camera is that if you are using the flash or red eye reduction features, the camera takes along time to snap the picture. The camera does power up very quickly and has some other nice features like continuous shooting, 3x optical zoom, etc. I bought a couple of extra batteries on Ebay for a great price and the charger allows you to charge the batter in the camera and a spare battery at the same time, so battery life does not seem to be problem for me. The 2.5" LCD is very nice as well and the anti-shake feature is very useful. All in all, I really like this camera, especially the DivX video, but I wish it would click the picture faster. I have missed some nice shots waiting for the shutter.