Pentax Optio S4i

I bought the S4i to upgrade from my old 3 mp Olympus when it first came out - and I have to say that although the Optio is cute and tiny, the Olympus takes better pictures. I'm about giving up on the s4i and saying it was money down the drain.

The biggest problem is that when you look at your pictures at 100%, they're pixelated. It looks like it's creating a larger image by interpolating pixels, not by actually capturing the image. This is OK for foliage, etc, but when peoples' faces look terrible at full size, it's just not good.

Also,the Canon doesn't white-balance properly, no matter how you adjust the settings, so a picture taken in bright sunlight will have washed-out bits - just white - nothing there even to adjust in Photoshop.

It also doesn't function as well in low-light settings (for taking pictures of bands, performances etc - all you will get is an orange blur, in a situation where the Olympus would take a decent picture). It's very bad at quickly focusing - half the pictures will be blurry, whether it's low lighting or not - but much worse in low lighting.

It also takes much longer to "recover" between pictures, even when the battery is fully charged, so you can't take a couple of pictures in quick sequence... you have to tell your friends... "wait... wait... it's still blinking - nope, it didn't go... hang on.... keep smiling!"

My next vacation - I'm resurrecting the Olympus out of the desk drawer - the Optio can stay at home!

overall the camera rocks! it has a delay that drives me crazy at times, but it's build tough as a rock. I dropped it twice, yes twice. Once in the bathroom tile floor screws popped out and all and another outside on the cement; it went crash, battery fell out, memory flew out, lost another screw, now it's only held together by three of the original 7 screws. but it still works, had it 2 1/2 years and I'm gonna buy another even if still has a crappy shot depay time.

If this little camera could take pictures the way it did everything else, it would be the best on the market. But it's tendency to blur photos and focus on NO certain place in the photo area makes it not worth case it doesn't come with. I had a Pentax 3 Meg that took the best photos I've ever seen. I thought it would one step up, but now it's one step out as I go and look for another camera.