As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present – it’s only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera.  It’s a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).  Having that much zoom is much, much more useful than I had thought it would be.  Instead of importing my photos from the camera and spending hours cropping each photo to get rid of useless stuff around the edges, most of my photos are framed exactly how I want them and I leave them as is.  The down side is that I’m still learning how to hold the camera still enough when zoomed in and have quite a few fuzzy photos because the camera shook.

It has full manual override as well which has already proven useful.  Taking photos of the kids playing is rather difficult when the camera decides to use a slow shutter speed to deal with the lowish light conditions (I didn’t let it use the flash as it gets annoying when someone is constantly taking flash photography and I didn’t want to distract people from acting normally).  Flicking it into shutter speed priority mode let it pick the optimal aperture and avoids blurring when the target is moving.  Many of those photos I ignored the cameras warning that it couldn’t set an aperture to match my desired shutter speed and the photos came out a little dark but that was quickly rectified in iPhoto.

The OptioMX also has a video mode which is quite usable.  It only does 640×480 but does a full 30fps and records pretty good audio with it.  The results appear a little small on a computer screen but would need to be shrunken further for e-mailing or web deployment and is the same quality as NTSC and PAL so displaying it on a TV screen looks as good as your camera work and lighting allows (ie: pretty bad in most cases but it’s not the camera’s fault).  While you wouldn’t buy the camera as a video camera, it was really nice to be able to very quickly shoot some video for action shots like the kids riding their bikes or playing soccer.  I mean quick too – no changing modes or fiddling with settings, just press the start recording button instead of the take photo button and you’re filming.  Both are just as easy to access with your thumb without moving your hand.

The flash pops up when you want it so you can easily control whether the flash is used or not by just not popping it up.  It also means that there is very little red eye effect because the flash is further away from the camera lens – I only found one person who came up with red eyes and she has the biggest pupils I’ve ever seen so it would have been hard to avoid.

Overall I’m very happy with it.  Now I just have to decide what the best way to publish my photos is…