Just when I thought the race for wide angle ultrazoom compact cameras had more or less settled, with the competitors already pacing their rounds, Pentax made a head-turning entry with the X70.
What makes the X70 a particularly interesting camera is the fact that it is Pentax first ever ultrazoom wide compact.
If the features are anything to go by, it looks like the X70 is not just any first. With a zoom range of 26mm – 624mm, 11fps continuous shot, it seems to be an excellent compact camera and a very able competitor to Nikon’s P90 or Kodak’s EasyShare Z980.
It will ship in April 2009 at US$399.95. Here are the features according to a press release by Pentax Imaging Company:
- 12 megapixels
- SLR-like body
- 24X optical zoom lens (26mm-624mm)
- aperture/shutter priority and metered manual modes
- hardware sensor-movement shake reduction
- fast operation, and a high quality zoom lens
- large, easy-to-view 2.7 inch color LCD monitor with approximately 230,000 dots of resolution
- an anti-reflection coating helps minimize glare from sunlight for more effective outdoor viewing
- electronic viewfinder
- 11 images per second and up to 21 images continuous shotsf
- fast face detection AF&AE; captures up to 32 faces in focus in approximately 0.03 seconds
- high quality movie clips, equivalent in image quality to that of high-definition TV (1280 x 720 pixels) at 15 frames per second; video at 848×480, VGA and QVGA resolutions at 30 frames per second
- ISO 50 up to ISO 6400
- image format choice proportions of 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 or 1:1
- a super macro mode may be used to shoot as close as 0.4 inches (1cm)
- digital wide mode quickly stitches 2 images together for an extra wide-angle image (equivalent to 20mm in the 35mm format)
- frame Composite mode (with 90 built-in image frames) offers fun and creative ways to style up your shots
- approximately 33.6MB of built-in memory (although not many would find this useful)
- red-eye reduction
- no RAW support though…
What took you so long, Pentax?
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