This is a rough translation of my original review (it's in Estonian and contains some photos as well).
Optio S5i is nice small (not to say tiny) camera, slightly smaller than credit card. With battery and memory card it weights about 120 grams so perfect for carrying around all the time in your pocket or bag. Throw in a 5 megapixel sensor and you should have a winner, right? Right? :)
Front and back panels of S5i have stripy metallic pattern and it really helps to grip what would otherwise be a small and slippery camera. I didn't attach the strap but never had any real scare over dropping it. Using strap is probably a smart thing to do nevertheless. It's pretty hard to use the small buttons with your gloves on but zoom and shutter controls are big enough. Why would you want to use this camera with your gloves on? Because where I live it's not very finger friendly weather for about 6 month in any year.
Steve at Steve's Digicams is not happy about the placement of ON/OFF button because you could press it when you really wanted to take a photo. I did not notice this during my one week testing. All other buttons and functions are pretty well laid out, if you've used any digital camera before there's pretty much no learning curve I would think.
Overall very good first impression from Optio S5i.
Tripod mount (not sure if that's the name) is not below lens so getting panoramas from tripod is not that easy but to help you out Optio S5i offers panorama shooting mode where you can see part of the previously shot frame for easier alignment.
Focusing is ok for a camera in this class, could be faster but probably in the same league as competitors. Getting moving objects sharp could be a challenge, especially if it's overclouded day or not so brightly lit room. In dimly lit room S5i starts to struggle, I had to spot it into a rather contrasty object and only then got focus fixed. One thing that bugged be about focusing was the fact that this Pentax does not tell you if the object you're trying to focus on is too close. So it could be difficult to determine if it's too close or camera is just having hard time trying to get focus.
Auto white balance is decent, but every now and then fails. For example a shot made early morning with clouded skies turned out rather bluish. Also shots taken couple of seconds apart indoors showed different colors.
As to shooting options - there are many. 21 all in all. Starting with usual portrait and landscape and ending with underwater mode. But you'll have to get the optional underwater housing to put this mode into full use. I did not give those shooting modes very thorough testing but "autumn" was a disappointment. It rendered the scene very violet and overexpose. Same place shot couple of seconds later with automatic everything gave nice rich autumn colors. I have this image in my original Estonian review (scroll down to a violet looking autumn picture).
Different shooting modes raised other questions as well. I was trying to shoot a picture with maximum amount of depth of field and tried program, landscape, portrait and macro mode but all gave the same aperture and shutter speed. Strange.
Flash is good for normal photos, I liked that it did not overexpose faces when used from around 80 centimeters away. Background was also not blackened out but contained fair amount of detail.
Macro mode was nice, minimum focusing distance is 6 cm. 3x zoom lense is pretty normal, covers most day to day shooting situations.
During long exposures noise reduction kicks in so it might take a while when your image is being processed and saved. My tests in near darkness turned out well.
Now for the fun part
In my Estonian review i ask a question "Could it be that 5 megapixels is too much?" Optio S5i is being promoted as the pocket size fun camera that can get you quality to print A4. I have a split opinion about it. Larger files is good because you never know which picture you are being asked to print out real big. On the other hand large files are slow to save, they take up space on your memory card and hard drive, it takes more time to copy and process them if needed.
I tried saving max resolution and highest quality picture that Optio S5i could provide to it's internal memory and clocked about 7 seconds. I am usually not that patient. You can use the screen to find your next frame but otherwise the camera is locked up, not possible to take next shot, not possible to review those already taken. This file ends up taking around 2.5-3 megs of space. At least deleting is faster.
Is that all? Unfortunately not. A week after testing Pentax Optio S5i I had the chance to try Olympus Mju Mini (a 4 MP camera) and Casio Exilim S100 (a 3 MP camera). I also tried Optio S5i side by side with older Canon A80 (4 MP). Here are my thoughts from all these experiences.
In my humble opinion advantage of 5 MP-s over 4 is not sufficient enough to tolerate slow write times. I don't need 4 frames per second shooting speeds but I do want decent frame to frame speed. When I have to lower resolution and/or quality setting then is there really a point in putting more into the camera in the first place? Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and I should get a different camera because it's not possible to get this size/speed combination at this point of time at all...
Now, I admit, that Canon PowerShot A80 is quite a different camera and perhaps it's not very fair comparison but still. I set both cameras to full auto, max quality and shot away. And ended up with results where Canon offered better detail even though it has only 4 megapixel sensor as compared to 5 that Pentax has. When I made a similar test comparing macro mode I couldn't say that one was better than the other.
Especially those objects that are a bit further away turned out fuzzy and not very well detailed. One could even say that Pentax optics are not up to the job but that is a bit hard to believe. And then, to turn everything upside down, S5i took really good photos in bright daylight with distant cranes having good detail. There's a 100% crop in the original review, click on this crane picture and you'll get original image as well.
I think you'd be wise to read Steve's Digicams review of the same camera as well. He usually is more optimistic about cameras and maybe I am being too critical here. For full disclosure: I don't own a digicam myself, I still shoot film (slide) and have only tested ~10 digital cameras so far.
What's the conclusion then?
I would buy this camera if I wanted something that was stylish, lightweight, had good ergonomics and easy to master menus (that is not to say that there aren't many options you could play around with) and good zoom lens. I would probably carry this camera around everywhere, set it's resolution lower than maximum so I would still get excellent prints at 10x15 cm but achieve faster saving times.
But don't take my word for it, read other reviews, go give it a try at your local shop and ask friends who have bought it. That is always sound advice. And then go get it from Amazon.
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