Canon D10 vs. Pentax W80: Fight
see also: G7 vs D-Lux 3
Preparing for my first sailing class last week, I took another trip into point-and-shoot land. The idea was to get something waterproof, since I assumed it would get splashed on the boat, which certainly happens when you go rafting.
Based on earlier reviews, I wanted the Pentax W60. Unfortunately, it was already discontinued, and nobody knew when the W80 was going to show up. So I borrowed Ian's Canon D10. Then the W80 turned up in stock at Amazon three days before I left, so I got one just in time. The point being that I took both of them to Berkeley with me. Here's how it turned out.
All right, so the point of this camera is to get some kind of pictures where otherwise I would have had none at all. I realize the results are not going to be great, and it's going to have the kind of gimmicky feature set meant for the most clueless user. In this respect, the W80 immediately meets–nay, exceeds–expectations. It's loaded with useless crap like in-camera aspect ratio selection (which just throws away some of the captured pixels), and I really don't need two different "modes" for Kids and Pets. "Smile Detection" has been chosen as the function of the one and only dedicated button. Fine. But even given all this, I'm still surprised to find that there is no Tv or Av mode. At all. Exposure compensation is possible via clunky menus, but that's all as you get. Ouch.
How does the D10 stack up? I find it just a little more usable, mostly because exposure compensation is only one beep away, and the case has one more button. So it hurts a little bit less when Canon dedicates one of them to that useless direct-print thing that nobody ever uses, as is their custom. The D10 also restrains itself to a mere fourteen goofy scene modes, slightly less redundant than the W80's twenty-four.
So, figuring when-in-Rome, I kept both cameras on either auto-everything or "beach" mode all week. Getting back to the hotel with the W80 on the first night, I have many pictures like this:
Here is a nice 40-foot ketch (how about that sailor talk? YARRR!), but what is going on with this picture? First of all, it has a strong blue cast, which makes no sense. The only source of light is the sun, at sea level, hardly difficult conditions. Here's what the scene actually looks like, after forcing the sails to a neutral white in Photoshop:
Every camera blows the white balance sometimes, but this blue-purple cast is pretty consistent, including after I took it out of "beach mode," which seems to be trying to exaggerate the blue of the sky and water. The D10 seems to be free of this problem:
Taking a closer look, things only get worse for Pentax:
| Canon D10 | Pentax W80 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The Canon doesn't blow me away, but it's in the mid-tier point and shoot ballpark. The Pentax would be in that ballpark too...if this were ISO 400. But this is ISO 64. 64! Aren't we getting about a trillion photons per pixel at this speed? Yet there's painful noise in both chroma (fake magenta and green tints) and luminance (overall grainy look). And at f/5.5, 1/400s, ISO 64, bright sun, on a subject that is barely moving, this should be showing us the camera at its best.
And the problems don't stop there:
| Canon D10 | Pentax W80 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
If you need to illustrate chromatic aberration, both cameras will do, but at least the Canon has to be pushed into blown-highlight territory. Again, not too bad, considering how the optics must be compromised to be able to zoom in a sealed package with no exposed moving parts. But the W80 happily bleeds purple fringes anywhere there's a light-dark transition. Fortunately those hardly ever happen in pictures.
If the image quality problems of the W80 were too subtle for you so far, try the movie mode. Watch in amazement as skin tones, brown rails, blue life jackets, and shadows all fade to purple. This isn't even the worst video by far; it's just one that Chrisi already uploaded to youtube so I don't have to.
Too bad, because the W80 claims 720p video at 30fps. There are a whole lot of pixels, they just all suck.
Here's me doing the same drill, as seen by the Canon D10. Fewer pixels, and the contrast isn't great (and I don't do as well at slowing the boat down), but the color looks more or less like it was shot under the Earth sun:
I've never said this before, but Pentax has made the W80 so bad that I don't want it. Assuming they'll take it, it's going back to Amazon. Some updated reviews are coming out now, and they confirm that somewhere in the process of smashing those so-very-important two more megapixels onto the sensor, they made the actual image quality dramatically worse than the W60.
If I really needed a waterproof camera, I'd have to get a D10. It did a perfectly serviceable job, and my only complaint is that it's so big and bulbous, and doesn't fit in a pocket. But the real moral of the story is that I don't need either of them, at least not for sailing. If you're going out for a class to do drills, it's hardly worth bringing any camera, because you're going to be busy all day. If you're going out to sail like a normal person, just use a normal camera. The wettest I got either of these was rinsing them under the faucet at the end of the day just in case they got splashed with salt water at some point.
Beware that there are huge gaps in my non-scientific test, such as: I never actually took either one underwater. So you'll want to read other opinions. But I'm pretty sure you won't find I've got it completely wrong, unless there is some kind of manufacturing problem with these early samples.
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