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“The Wacom Cintiq 12wx is all about productivity, and here the Cintiq shines. At $999 it won’t fit into everyone’s budget, but if you’re a pro and spend your non-shooting hours editing images, the Cintiq will pay for itself in short order. As a reviewer, I get to play with lots of fun products. Most of them go back at the end of the review without hesitation. The Wacom Cintiq 12wx is one of the rare items that comes through that has me digging out my wallet to buy.”

“Pentax have concentrated on making the Optio Z10 very easy-to use, with most aspects of the camera designed to be standard and non-intimidating. There are a wealth of different scene and playback modes to suit the camera’s target audience. On the downside, image quality is severely hampered by noise, which appears at ISO 200, becomes very noticeable at ISO 400, and reduces images to a pixellated mess by ISO 3200. The digital Shake Reduction mode offered by the Z10 simply increases the ISO speed up to the maximum of 3200, which could leave you with some very unattractive photos. The Z10 with its 7x zoom lens really suffers from not having a true optical or CCD-shift anti-shake system, and it doesn’t compare well with other 7x zoom cameras like the Ricoh R7, which do offer this system.”

The Pentax K10D is an excellent mid-range digital SLR camera that manages to achieve the difficult task of being intuitive to use whilst offering a lot of complex functionality. Pentax have included a number of genuinely useful innovations that help to make the K10D stand out from the crowd. The various new shooting modes, dust and water-resistance, anti-shake and dust-removal systems are all extremely welcome at this price-point, and there are many more nice touches too numerous to mention.

The 7 megapixel images are noisy and slightly blurred at ISO 400, with ISO 800 and particularly 1600 being best avoided. With no optical image stabilisation system available, this limits the camera to good light photography only. ISO Auto Shift is a useful feature that’s sadly let down by the quality available at ISO 800, whilst beginners will love the Face Detection feature which provides well focused and exposed family pictures. So the Canon Digital IXUS 70 is obviously not going to satisfy everyone, as it doesn’t offer full manual control over aperture and shutter speeds and the image quality is not best in class, but if you want a stylish ultra-compact camera, the IXUS 70 is still well worth considering.

The Epson P-5000 is both a forward leap in terms of functionality and speed, and perhaps a backwards step for some photographers in terms of the overall design. The P-5000 is much quicker than the older P-4000 model. The transfer speed from memory card to the P-5000 is twice as quick, helping to ensure that you can achieve over 25 x 1Gb transfers before the battery runs out. Many photographers will probably want to upgrade on the strength of this single improvement alone. 

The Olympus E-400’s compact size might be enough to set it apart from the competition but once a protruding lens is attached it isn’t exactly pocket sized. That said, it could be the final nail in the coffin for bridge cameras like the Sony R1 and the Samsung Pro815, as it is lighter and smaller and offers all the creative benefits that an interchangeable lens camera can offer.