Pentax Optio S7 Digital Camera Announced

The Pentax Optio S7 is a new addition to the slim and stytlish S line of Pentax Optio cameras.  A successor to the S6, the S7 features a 7 megapixel sensor, 2.5 inch LCD (with 232K pixels), 3x optical zoom, and some of Pentax' newer technologies, like Face Recognition AF & AE.  The S7 will be available on a limited basis in September for under $300.

The Face Recognition technology from Pentax detects faces within a portrait to correctly set focus and exposure on the face.  Having this technology simplifies portrait-taking since you have less of a chance of missing the focus point, which should be the face.  The camera also has the Tracking AF system seen on some of their other cameras announced at PMA in February, like the Optio T10.

The S7 also features a Blur Reduction High ISO mode.  In this mode, the ISO (sensitivity) of the sensor is boosted, up to ISO 1600, to increase shutter speed and reduce the blur.  Note that in this mode, the sensor resolution is bumped down to 4 megapixels in order to attempt to control noise that occurs that high ISO values.

Additionally, the S7 captures movies up to a resolution of 640x480 at 30 frames per second with an MPEG-4 DivX format and has 23MB of internal memory.  It is the first Pentax compact camera that is able to use the recently announced SDHC format, in addition to your standard SD format cards.  (SDHC allows memory card capacities over 2GB by using a FAT32 file system.)

Full press release