Why it’s a Pentax my dear! We thought, “why not write a review of our newly acquired Pentax Optio s5z?” This sucker rocks and yes, this absolutely biased review will tell you why.
Actually the truth is we’re doing a review of this ultracompact digital camera because Pentax wouldn’t sport us one of their sweet digital SLR’s. They must a thought we’d break it and in all likelihood, we probably would.
No, the real reason is we just likes it, we really likes it, very much. Look, it’s got 5.0 zillion megapixels, 3x optical zoom (how do they squeeze the lens in this tiny little doohickey is a mystery to me), and a giant 2.5inch color LCD monitor with total coverage. It’s got sex appeal without the required bloodletting of your wallet. And trust us, everything loses sex appeal if you can’t buy a lady a drink.
This thing does video, too! No fo-real. We have 512 meg SD ram chip in this thing and it stores nearly 40 minutes at ultra crisp 30 fps. Oh yeah, there’s 10 megs on-board ram which gives you enough to get started, but it’ll have you running back to your computer to offload the images so many times you’ll quickly run out of excuses to cover frequently peculiar absences. Your friends will become highly suspicious of a personal problem and the next thing you know, you find them sitting you in living room with your parents and the intervention counselor.
Yo, this thing is light at merely 3.7 ounces… (yes about that, and perhaps you should see someone about your errhm, “hobby”). Set the highest settings and this babe will produce 2560 x 1920 photo of your ugly mug and you’ll be able to finally get a full count of your nose hairs. The menu settings are easy to navigate and with the quick setup green mode button, you can say the hell the manual and just start taking shots. The “don’t make me think” crowd will love that feature, and for the rest of you that like to slip hairs with the minutia of life, you will find this little ultracompact has plenty of buttons and settings to keep you busy for a long while. You’ll have to RTFM though if you want to know it all. There are short cuts assigned to every button by pressing and holding for a short moment.
It comes with a USB cable, lithium batter, charger, and pretty decent ADC photo software. ADC photo software will organize, categorize, and store those precious nude photos of your ex for years of viewing pleasure. If you’re into buying every accessory known to man, it comes built in with PictBridge technology, so you can plot this sucker a photo printer and do everything without the use of a computer. Gasp, did we just discover something we can do with a computer??
Look, you can’t go wrong with this one. Pentax, we still want an SLR, but for now this will do just fine.
For an ultracompact, this is gets a solid 4 out of 5 B.A.R.s for this baby.
Insider Info This has a time lapse delay movie feature, so you can set it up to literally watch the grass grow.Not So Cool If you're looking for more tightly integrated photo sharing software, you'll need to find something with more juice. There are some basic utilities to share your photos online, but extended storage and printing will have to still be done manually with some other third-party software/service. Let us know if you got a any good ones.How Much Dinero? This will run ya about $200. |  Photo by Pentaximaging.com
|  Photo by Imaging-resource.com
|  Photo by sontion.ru
|  Photo by sontino.ru
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March 14th, 2006 at 4:15 am
Hello,
I also bought the s5z and i love it, but i have no idea how to use this time lapse delay movie feature and I did not see anything related in teh manual.
How do you set it up to watch the grass grow?
thanks a lot
March 14th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Hello my friend Roberto. Thank you for post your question. We sent out a team of twenty readers to comb through the manual and after twenty hours and 10 minutes, we found the page you may be looking for.
In your Pentax Option S5z Operating Manual, you will want to turn to page 70, “Taking Time-lapse Movies.”
Basically, you just need select the menu button, scroll down until you find the “Movies” option, click right and in that sub-menu you’ll see timelapse settings to mess around with.
You’ll want to prop your camara on something sturdy, holding it for hours doesn’t seem like fun.
April 12th, 2006 at 1:41 am
hi , I have s5z and when i open the movies that i recorded with my cam in my computer i get a delay between the sound and the picture ,i tried also to open it in another computer and it doesn’t work ..
How do i fix the problem ?
April 12th, 2006 at 9:24 am
That’s really odd Louis. I don’t get that problem with my camera. Might be a malfunction with yours, definitely check with Pentax on that.
April 25th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I hope you’re right about this camera. I was gonna buy one that cost $299 and decided I could get by with this one when I was only paying $165 (including shipping!). Did you have any complaints about the display in sunlight? I keep seeing complaints about that, but my current camera also sucks in that regard. I’m not entirely sure about how they’re supposed to fix that.
April 28th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Hi Ellen. Like I said in the email I sent ya, I think you’re going to be pretty happy with this camara’s video. Most LCD screens have problems in direct sunglight. But again, I think the screen is big enough and bright enough that it’s a rare problem… I haven’t noticed with mine.