Pentax EI-2000

There have been two conspicuous absentees from the digital camera market - the well-known camera maker Pentax, a brand synonymous with photography, and affordable SLR digital cameras. Well that gap has now been filled as Pentax recently dipped its toes into the turbulent waters of digital photography with the release of two cameras: one compact zoom, the EI-200, and an SLR model, the EI-2000.

There are other digital SLRs on the market - both Canon and Nikon make them - but they tend to have 'professional' price tags of a couple of grand. The EI-2000 is a more respectable £700, which is on a par with many 'range-finder' compact digital cameras. This sum buys you a built-in zoom lens, auto-focus, auto-exposure and auto-flash. Both new cameras are the result of a joint development program with Hewlett packard so you'll see them sporting the HP logo as well.

Pentax hasn't gone for broke with its new cameras and the EI-2000 has a relatively modest specification. It's a 2.24 megapixel CCD, offering 1600 x 1200 pixel images with 36bit colour depth. Its sensitivity range is equally modest. It is equivalent to films between ISO 25 and 400. On the glass front, it has a 3X zoom (equivalent to 34-107mm lens on a 35mm SLR) with a maximum aperture of f/3.9 to f/2.5: nothing special for a zoom and a bit dim for a standard lens.

Nevertheless, for general daylight tasks, this lens is very capable - it can auto-focus down to 0.5m while in macro mode it can focus down to 20mm. Having an SLR is such a big advantage over compact 'range-finders' because you can actually frame a shot with a degree of accuracy. One niggle is that the viewfinder lens is located on the left of the body, not centrally, which is the usual position on SLRs. That said, you could always use the hinged LCD display if you can't actually get your eye near the camera.

The typical SLR user is used to having total control over exposure and they'll feel at home with the EI-2000. You get a choice of metering modes; spot, centre-weighted and average, shutter speeds from 1/1000th down to four seconds, +/- 3EV compensation, auto-bracketing of half or one stop either side and colour temperature compensation. There are a handful of exposure modes, too. You can choose from aperture or shutter priority, manual, programmed and a raft of subject-matter modes. Well-placed dials and buttons make it easy to control what is a fairly complicated piece of kit.

The EI-2000 stores its images on Compact Flash cards - it comes with an 8Mb CF card as standard, which is a bit mean as this will hold only one uncompressed tiff image and 13 shots taken at the 'Better' image quality, which is a bit light in our eyes. True, you could invest in bigger CF cards but sadly the EI-2000 doesn't take the ultimate in CF storage, the IBM Microdrive. Transferring the images to a PC is easy with the supplied USB cable - a Windows 98 PC sees the camera as another removable disk drive.

And if you have an HP PhotoSmart printer, you can use the EI-2000's infrared JetSend facility to beam your images straight to a printer via its IrDA port. This isn't particularly fast but as colour printing is a painfully slow process, this isn't a problem. If you have another camera that has the Flashpoint Digital camera firmware, you can even beam a snap over to it.

As with most digital cameras, this one has a video output, letting you plug it into an RGB socket on a TV or VCR to show your handiwork on a large screen. One neat touch is automatic image orientation. This means when you take a snap in portrait mode, it's saved in portrait mode - a boon if you're giving a 'slide show' on a TV.

Apart from 36bit colour depth, the EI-2000's claim to fame is the image processing (courtesy of HP) that takes place to optimise your pictures, adjusting for tricky lighting conditions and colour balance. And the images it delivers certainly bear close scrutiny - A4 prints, taken at the modest 'Better' setting, reveal very little pixellation or noise.

The EI-2000 may be a megapixel shy of the market leaders but this deficiency really didn't manifest itself in the finished result - it delivers very good images indeed.

CONTACT Pentax 01753 792 792 www.pentax.co.uk