Strengths:Super-compact (all but fits in an Altoids mint tin), 3x lens retracts & protect optics, sharp pics, fast power-on, big&sharp LCD, easy-to-use controls with a great set of scene modes, good auto focus.
Weaknesses:No viewfinder! Manual controls hard to access. "Trash can" button resets exposure controls to default in shooting mode, but you can't set your own "defaults." Barrel & chromatic edge distortion.
Posted May 19, 2006 - My last camera was a 4 megapixel Optio S4, which has just about everything you could want out of a pocket-sized camera. I loved the fact that I could use an Altoids mint tin as a camera case (I lined my mint tin with felt so I could toss it and my S4 in my pocket and not worry about it getting banged up), and it took darned good pictures for such a small camera. A really great point-n-shoot that does a truly outstanding job for such a compact camera. The S4's biggest downside was small & hard to read LCD.
Alas, my wonderful S4's LCD display got cracked, so I had to replace it. I liked the S4 so much I just automatically replaced it with the newer 6-megapixel S6.
The Optio S6 maintains almost all of the earlier Optio S line's charm. The daylight pictures are clear with great detail, though there's some barrel distortion and darkening at the corners of the S6's wide-angle pictures (a price I think pay with any of the super-compact cameras; there's only so much you can do with a lens that's crammed and folded into such a small package when it closes down). The auto-focus light, a new feature, is a great ad and allows for well-focused flash pictures, though I thought the S6s low-light pictures without the flash were a little grainy.
The thing I do miss from my old S4 is the viewfinder. The S6's LCD may be big and clear, but that doesn't help me when I have to either put my glasses on or hold the camera a arm's length to properly see how my picture is being framed.
A minor complaint is that the finger-ridge on the front of the camera under the shutter button, which makes the camera easier to hold, also makes it just slightly thicker in that spot than an Altoids tin. I fixed the problem by embossing a ridge in my Altoid-tin case using a nut-pick as an embossing stylus to create a ridge in the altoids tin finger ridge on the camera is. Problem solved.
My recommendation If you're looking for a camera that fits in your pocket and don't mind a camera that doesn't have a viewfinder, it's hard to do better than the S6.
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Rated 
Great camera but missing my fave feature
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divx, small
Beware - Pentax Service is abyssmal
Frustrated
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