So we give you the Pentax Optio 555 a metal bodied baby which packs that all important 5 mega pixel CCD chip but it is much more than just a pretty face. The in built Pentax SMC 5 X lens is all important yes it has a 4x digital zoom as well but for pure image quality an optical zoom is essential.

The Optio 555 is suitable for both extremes of user too with the auto mode being pretty amazing for helping even the most novice digital snapper take great shots. The auto focus for example has a spot focus mode or a selectable focus area and even a wide focus which seems to deliver even in difficult compositions of shot, all of which is operated via the 4 way joystick control.

At the other end of the scale the Pentax Optio 555 is one of the most controllable cameras we've had to play with, everything from  exposure, flash and aperture apart from its small size 100 x 59 x 39.5 millimetres there is little to put off the more advanced photographer especially if this is a second camera to compliment a full size SLR.

While setting the exposure can be done with pentax's multi segment exposure meter you also get a number of preset modes much to the delight of LP who was getting a little lost in the menus by now. You can select between daylight, tungsten, warm fluorescent, daylight fluorescent and so on. use of the 555 in either auto or manual produces a consistently high image quality this is great if you intend to enlarge images our prints looked great at A3 without and adjustments, even cropping and then zooming back out to fill an A4 gave a high quality image.

Battery life is important to the digital snapper as storage size increases its far more likely you'll run out of juice before places to store images, after the initial 2 hour charge the battery should be good for 200 images depending on flash usage and the amount of time spent with the screen fully illuminated.

Storage is dealt with by means of an SD / MMC slot and Pentax are just a little stingy with only a 16mb card as standard we'd have to recommend at least a 128mb card considering the size of full resolution 5 mega pixel images. Having more spec is even more important if you want to use the toys, for example the ability to record video which seems to have made its way onto all of the latest crop of digital cameras. The Pentax Optio 555's video capability is limited to 320 x 240 pixels resolution which hardly makes it seem worthwhile especially when you consider that your 16mb SD card will be full in 41 seconds!

The other way to fill up an SD card is the Pentax Optio interval shooting mode which enables you to try those time lapse style sequences that feature on wildlife programmes, although we found it works quite well on a busy street or road when you overlay the images in Photoshop. The continuous shooting mode is great for capturing action, and helped LP cover up his inability to take a photo of any fast moving objects.

Control of the Pentax Optio 555 is easy for the novice the menus are simple to navigate with icons that actually represent what they do and its all visible on the high contrast 1.5inch TFT screen which dominates the rear of the camera. There are lots of other toys like picture filters a self timer and the ability to store audio too but the Optio 555 really is a first class camera which to its credit is easy to drive too.

Selling for £400 quality doesn't come cheap but the Pentax Optio 555 is well built and will be an investment unlike so many of the plastic clad 3 or 4 mega pixel cameras which are being discounted heavily.

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