However, there are times where I have wished for just a little more quality and perhaps a little more zoom where the iPhone has just fallen short. I’d considered a Canon S95 after seeing a friends recent photos from New York City, but the £300+ pricetag for something that wouldn’t get major use in my hands did seem like something of a waste.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing a sale on Play.com when I saw the Pentax Optio I-10 for £69.99, down from £119.99 (now currently at £89.49 for the black version). The first thing that attracted me to this camera wasn’t it’s spec of 12MP, HD video with 5x Optical Zoom. I’m going to be totally honest and tell you that it’s retro styling rather than mahoosive mega-pixels was the head-turner. However, I decided to read a few reviews before hitting the buy button to make sure this wasn’t just style over substance.

The reviews I read were pretty mixed. For every one that said it was awesome, another said it was to be avoided – walk away and don’t look back at it’s beauty. But as hard as I tried I just couldn’t ignore how good it looked, nor imagining scenarios where it would be perfect to just pull out of my pocket and snap away. Knowing I could return the item if I wasn’t one hundred percent satisfied, I went ahead and ordered it.

I found the interface pretty easy to use – quite simple looking menus, no problem there. I have the manual downloaded to my Mac so I will step away from the presets on there and do things more manually once I get familiar with it. The first photos I took were macro, indoors in fairly low natural light. On the 2.7″ LCD screen the pics looked reasonable, but when uploaded to the computer I was starting to feel the love turning to nothing but a short lived cheap animal lust. There was quite a bit of noise and it didn’t particularly look 12MP at all.

I’d already browsed some Flickr groups for photos taken with the Pentax I-10 so I knew it was capable of some really good outdoor shots, so I decided that I would wait for a nice sunny day to really put it to the test. I’d gathered it’s bits and pieces in the box, ready to send back should the photos not live up to expectation – and was chastising myself for even thinking that a camera priced at £69 would give me anything as good as I was expecting.

So, on a lovely sunny day like yesterday I decided to let the camera do the talking:

(click images for bigger)

I am thrilled with the results. They were all edited only very slightly using Flare for Mac, but straight from the camera these were very impressive photos. And to quote one of my Flickr friends who commented on the above photo…

The equipment is mostly irrelevant. It is the photographer that makes the photo. A three hundred dollar pair of Air Jordans does not give you the ability to play pro basketball. You made this picture. Not your camera. Well done.

I do have to agree with him. And I suppose my logic for going ahead and buying the camera despite some scathing reviews was a little to do with the fact that I managed some excellent shots with my old 2MP SONY Cybershot camera, despite it’s low spec. The subject and having an eye for it is so much more important than it having 200 megapixels and a 60x zoom.

My trusty Fuji S5700 7MP camera has served me well for a good few years now, but has been developing some glitches over the past year so replacing it with the Pentax I-10 makes sense. And unlike the Fuji which was quite a bulky chunky thing, this can easily be put into my pocket, much like the camera I always have on me – iPhone 4.

[rating: 4/5]

Now there is a way to silence iPhoto when you plug in your iPhone, with a neat (and free) little system preferences pane called Cameras. You can manage what happens when you connect your Digital Camera(s), iPhone, Digital Media Writer and any photo device.

Upon installing Cameras you plug in one of your devices to get started and the app will ask you what want to do. As you can see from my image above, I have asked it to Open iPhoto for my Digital Camera but to Do Nothing for my iPhone.

Now all we need is a clever little plugin to stop iPhoto going into slideshow mode when we press play on our Apple Remote which was intended for a song….

Gingerly I switched it on, desperate to hear it’s ‘beep’ which would assure me it was still alive. It beeped. I breathed again. I tried a few of the settings, zoomed in and out and took some photos. All appears to be well. The camera cost me a little over £100 so it’s not like it’s massively expensive to replace, but I have to say I do love this camera and have absolutely no intentions of parting with it. This is the photo I was in the process of taking – this one was taken post-fall.

Many a time I have put the camera on the tripod and been concerned that I would accidentally kick it and knock it to the floor. I didn’t have such a concern today as the tripod wasn’t extended to it’s maximum height, so it seemed reasonably stable.

So, that was an unplanned test of the Fuji Finepix S5700′s robustness and durability on behalf of Fruit Bytes readers. It passed.