The best digital camera my husband and I ever owned was a Pentax W10 it lasted for years and took great photos.. very resilient. We figured that if a W10 is this great that a W80 would be even better but we were sadly mistaken after receiving our W80 and taking a few photos. At first, when all the photos we took turned out grainy I figured it was the settings that needed to be changed.As a military photojournalist, I shoot daily with a Nikon D3, I know how to change settings and reduce the ISO to make the photo less grainy and even after I exhausted all changes to the settings, the photos were still unimpressive. We went outside thinking that more lighting would mean better focus and better photos but even they were a little soft and not that great.
I might recommend this for the outdoorsy type but for someone like my husband and I who are looking for a point-and-shoot camera that takes impressive photos (without fumbling through settings all the time) it was not for us. We are in the process of returning it.
The camera feels small and tough, and I haven't had the short battery life that others have commented on (seems like I get about 15 hours or so of off and on use per charge). It can take AMAZING shots if you take a little time to learn the settings. Manual macro shots of up-close items look terrific, and the panorama feature on this camera stitches separate pictures together better than my old Kodak 1063 did.
The underwater shots look pretty good, especially if taken on days with sufficient sunlight, and I'm not seeing any signs of the camera leaking.
Overall I'm really pleased with this little camera. It has a lot of neat features if you just take the time to learn about them. Originally I was deciding between this camera and an Olympus 1050sw, but my friend with the Olympus can't take shots that look nearly as good as what I've been able to take with my camera, so I'm very happy overall.Just bought this camera given anticipated buzz.
Admittedly, I have not tried it underwater, or tested its ruggedness. But I am sending it back because it won't even take normal pictures accurately without graininess, blurriness and movement. Also, the delay is far too long, and image stabilization does not work accurately. Additionally, if subjects are moving, it's quite difficult to get a reasonable picture in low-ish light. To be fair, I tried a variety of mode settings including auto and a variety of manual settings, and frankly my iPhone took better pictures (without a flash!). In fact, the best pictures I took were in "green mode", and these were not really comparable to a generic 3-5 year old digital camera.
Maybe this camera has a niche use for underwater/etc only, but I had planned on taking "normal" pictures of reasonable quality with it as well, and I just couldn't find a way for this to work, so this is a non-starter for me.
I should have waited for the reviews to come out before taking the plunge:
see for comparisons to D10 and TS1. Of note, even the W60 performed better in this review!!!I preordered this directly from Pentax, and I've had it for less than a week. I know someone with a W30 who is very happy with his, so I figured this would be much better. So far, I'm very disappointed. I'm comparing it to my Canon SD850 by shooting macro, interior and exterior scenes. I have left the settings in auto mode and set it to record highest quality. The W80 produces very noisy images. Flash results seem to be a bit erratic. Very poor image quality in low-light. Side-by-side photo comparisons on-screen show better images with my Canon.
I also figured that since there is no moving lens, the W80 would have excellent battery life. Canon battery is 1120-mAh and W80 is only 680-mAh. The actual battery life is commensurately poor. I can get by on a weekend trip with lots of photos with only a single battery in my Canon, but I'm sure I would need to take two or three with the Pentax.
I really wanted this camera to work out, but I'm about to send it back. Anybody else have some feedback on this camera??
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