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A fully-fledged mid-range DSLR in a compact body, at an entry-level price – this is how one could distill the essence of the Olympus E-520 into one sentence. The new camera inherits the very well designed body, efficient handling and semi-professional feature set of its predecessor, and gains important capabilities such as wireless TTL flash control, Shadow Adjustment Technology and contrast-detect auto-focus in Live View. JPEG shooters will be delighted to learn that the default tone curve applied by the in-camera processing yields much more pleasing out-of-camera results, particularly with respect to the way specular highlights are rendered. 

“The Ricoh GX200 builds on the success of an already unique and very capable camera, the GX100, adding a small number of significant new features and a larger number of “nice-to-haves”. By far the most important improvement is the operational speed of RAW mode. The 6 second file write time and lack of continuous shooting offered by the GX100 has thankfully been replaced by near-instantenous write times in single-shot mode and the ability to shoot up to 5 RAW images at 1.18fps in continuous mode. Now you truly can shoot either JPEG or RAW images with the GX200 without much difference between the two modes, perfect for the photographer who wants to extract the best image quality possible and retain full control over post-processing.”

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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.