Pentax on Monday announced the Optio E60, a 10.1 megapixel point-and-shoot the company says will retail for less than $140, and on Tuesday released the slightly more powerful Optio M60—a $180 camera Engadget.com termed “another yawner.”
In point of fact, both are a bit ho-hum when lined up against some of the envy-inducing, feature-rich point-and-shoots that have been gracing the market as of late. This could be partially evidenced by the fact that in the corporate press release announcing the M60, Pentax makes an effort to point out that “aluminum alloy, which has a sophisticated texture, is used for the body’s exterior.” Hey, if ever there were to be a deciding factor when camera shopping, it would be the texture sophistication level, right?
Just the same, both seem at first blush to be a decent-sized bang for a pretty small buck, and classy-looking enough to carry to a party in spite of that—you wouldn’t fall into the same category as those folks snapping pics at social gatherings with digitals you can only assume they picked up in the checkout aisle. Instead, people would look at your camera and say, “My, is that camera of yours housed in aluminum alloy? It appears to have quite a sophisticated texture.”
So, about some of the actual features: Any solid point-and-shoot has to be a group shot workhorse, and Pentax addresses that with the M60 through a “high-speed face recognition” feature that purportedly allows the camera to identify up to 32 individual faces within .03 seconds. The M60 also offers 5x optical zoom, a 2.5-inch LCD screen, a movie mode with 640 or 320 settings, a panorama mode, 36.5 megabytes of built-in memory and a lithium-ion battery. Check out a full list of M60 features here.
The more basic E60 has a 2.4-inch screen, 3x optical zoom, 6.3 megabytes of built-in memory, a face recognition feature that catches up to just 10 faces at a time, a panorama feature, and is powered by AA batteries. Check out a full list of E60 features here.
If those features don’t entice you, try focusing on the sophisticated alloy.
