EI-200

The initial "power up" LCD display leaves no doubts about this camera being a multi-company development.   Pentax and H-P jointly created this camera, it is also marketed as the PhotoSmart C618.

The camera's internal operating system was developed by FlashPoint and is called the Digita O/S.   Visit Digitaphoto.com for more information, tips, tricks and scripts - this is a user-programmable operating system !

A typical Record mode screen. Pressing the bottom-left button cycles through the One-Shot, Continuous and Time-Lapse recording modes. Pressing the "Overlay" button toggles the onscreen information displays and pressing the "Status" button brings up the screen shown in the next frame.

You never have to guess what the camera settings are, you just press the "Status" button while in record mode to bring up this screen full of information.

Here is the screen while in the Shutter-priority recording mode. The user can select shutter speed values from 4 seconds to 1/1000 sec.

This is the Aperture-priority recording mode screen, selectable aperture values in wideangle are F2.4, 4.8 and 9.6, in telephoto they are F4, 8 and 16.

In Manual Focus mode you can select any of the following focus distances: 0.1m, 0.2m, 0.3m, 0.5m, 0.7m, 1.0m, 1.5m, 3m, 10m or INF.

In addition to the 3X optical zoom there is also Digital Zoom with three settings: 1.2X, 1.5X and 2X.  Digital zoom simply enlarges the central portion of the image so the image quality is always somewhat degraded.  If you want to crop and zoom do it later with software, it's better.

This is the first of about twenty-five recording mode menu screens, to see them all just click on the picture to open another window.