Pentax Optio S45 Digital Camera

The Camera is nice and compact and has a sturdy Aluminium Casing and features a 3 x optical Zoom Lens with an additional 8 x Digital Zoom. The camera has a large easy to read LCD Screen and a wheel on the top that selects the various shooting modes. The easiest to use ids the 'Green' Mode that is simply Point and Shoot, although the 'Program' Mode will give better control of Flash and exposure. In addition, there are other programs for Portraits and Landscapes and if the Dial is swithched to the 'Pict' (Picture) Mode, then there are additional Programs for Super Macro and for photographing Sunsets and in Low light etc, which come in useful, as the Camera speeds and Apertures cannot be manually adjested, although you do have a Manual focus option and can change the ISO sensitivity etc, which means you could increase this to give you higher shutter speeds in High Light, but then cause a compromise in other areas, such as aperture selection, but good to play around with.
The Camera has a 'Movie' mode which appears to give fairly 'jerk' free filming, providing the lighting and Sd Card are capable of coping and ther is sound as well. SD Cards are cheap now, I bought a 1GB Card for £8.99 and that will store nearly 400 photos at the Max settings, so enough for me.
The Camera comes with various leads, including one to transfer images to your Camera; forget about loading the supplied software, just use your Scanner and Camera Wizard in XP and Vista (With the Camera Connected) and it will set up the transfer automatically, although I just remove the Card from the Camera and inset it in the Card Reader of my Computer and Copy & Paste to a Folder on my Computer and that is a lot quicker!!
Saves using the Batery Power from the Camera as well.
Photo quality seeems fine, although some reviews state that the Pictures are not sharp, but as with all Cameras, if you can rest the Camera on something whilst taking the picture, then they will come out better and there is a setting on the Camera to sharpen the images a bit as well.

I found the quality to be acceptable and more than enough for a Travel Camera and will enlarge to 8 x 10 without any problem.

Most pictures, such as landscapes, will have large areas of Colour such as Green in them anyway, so unless you want to highly enlarge one of these, then you will find that most mid-close distance pictures will have plenty of detail in them, as long as you try and take sharp pictures and not enlarge too much.
4 million Pixels is plenty and remember the closer you are to the subject, the more detail the available Pixels will be able to recreate, as the Pixels will not be spread out as much, so they can be used to include more detail, rather than being used to display Fields or Sky colours in the background, again, especially if you enlarge a great deal.
The macro Quality is very good and some excellent pictures can be obtained, but again, keep the Camera steady!
Flash coverage is good to normal Portrait distances and the Flash illuminates nicely, although the Camera sometimes finds focusing in low light difficult, as it dores not have an AF illuminator, so you will have to Focus on something nearby, at the same distance and holding the shutter Button halfway, recompose on your subject and shoot.

But hardly ever a problem.
Pros: Sturdy, Large Screen, Good Shooting Modes, Good images, Power consumption.

Cons: Flash takes 5-10 seconds to charge, no viewfinder, so keep camera steady!!!