The Optio S40 should appeal largely to new digital photographers and folks who sometimes feel overwhelmed by the complexity of digital photography. Indeed, the Optio's claim to fame is a built-in help system that explains the camera's operation in a fair amount of detail on the LCD. The S40 can even tell you what size prints your images will yield based on the selected resolution. It's the first model we've ever seen with this degree of user-friendliness. Otherwise, the Optio is a somewhat typical 4-megapixel camera. It's quite compact, more than small enough to slip into a shirt pocket. It features 11MB of internal memory and an SD memory card slot, a 3X optical zoom and a streamlined interface. There's a dial on the top for selecting from the handful of programmed exposure modes and the video option. A five-way navigation button and surrounding dimple buttons round out camera operation by controlling the flash, focus, and other details.

 

Despite its overall user-friendliness, we didn't care for the way Pentax divides the camera's many exposure modes between the dial on the top of the cameraNhome to common settings like portrait, night, and landscape modesNand less common, but still useful shooting modes like museum (optimized for no-flash, low-light exposures). In all, there are over a dozen shooting options, plus audio recording and movie mode, and unless you memorize the arrangement, you'll be forever hunting through the dial and LCD menu to find what you need for any given situation.

 

Still, the Optio S40 is an all-around good camera, taking pictures with accurate color and exposure. We found that the images did show a little bit of visual noise, though, especially indoors. It also takes about 5 seconds to prepare for the first picture when you turn the S40 on. In the final analysis, the Optio S40 doesn't have the same amount of intelligence as the HP Photosmart but it has enough to make life easier for digital shutterbugs.