Pentax announces cheap 10MP compact for fall
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Pentax Optio E60
(Credit: Pentax)When you're about ready to start carving your Halloween pumpkins, Pentax will be starting to ship the E60, a basic black budget compact point-and-shoot. At the moment, its most notable claim to fame is the price: less than $140, which is pretty aggressive for a 10-megapixel model.
With the low price comes the rest of the parade of budget features: relatively narrow 32-96mm 3x zoom lens, compared to the barrage of wide-angle lenses we'll be seeing this fall; smallish, low-resolution 2.4-inch LCD; and no physical image stabilization. It does run off AA batteries, which many consider a nice option, and supports the latest crop of convenience features, like Auto Picture mode for automatic scene selection and a misnamed Face Recognition AF & AE mode: it does face detection, not recognition (it knows there's a person in the scene, but not that she's grandma).
Today the company also announced the Optio M60, a 10-megapixel, 5x zoom model with a nice design and a couple other minor step-up features, but we won't be seeing it in the U.S., except in the hands of tourists from Europe.
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Senior Editor Lori Grunin has been covering digital imaging for two decades, but her memory's kind of sketchy on the details. You can hear about it every week on Indecent Exposure, the podcast she co-hosts with Matt Fitzgerald. 
