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To the tune of "It's been a LONG, LONG time." or maybe "How LONG has this been goin' on?" may we present the latest champion in the point-and-shoot zoom wars, the Pentax IQZoom 200.
Curiously, for the last few years Pentax has been competing with itself on this front.
While most manufacturers have drawn the line at 140mm or 145mm, Pentax P/S zoom lenses have pushed to 160mm (the IQZoom 160) and now... skipping right past 175mm or t180mm to 200min No other manufacturer is even close at this point.
The IQZoom 200, despite a substantial snout that invited any number of appallingly vulgar comments here, is actually a familiar face. The design-both cosmetic and functional-is much like that of the IQZoom 160, which we tested in September '96.
Like the 160, the IQZoom 200 uses passive wide-area autofocus (needed with longer lenses) and operates by a control layout dominated by a conveni.nt dial accessing flash and exposure modes. If you like the basic operation and handling of the 160, you'll have no problem with the 200.
Like most big, big point-andshoots, the IQZoom 200 makes up for its size with pleasant, positive handling: you can get a solid, firm grip on this beast, and smallhanded users liked it as much as the big-pawed among us.
View through the real-image finder (surrounded by a nice rubbery bezel) is quite clear and distortion free... with one annoying excention. If you adiust the diopter control so that the view is clear at shorter focal lengths, the finder gets blurry around 200mm. Adjust it to be clear at 200mm, andyou've got the idea. Our best advice: leave the adjustment be for the shorter focal lengths where you'll be doing most of your shooting. Eye relief, in the mean time, is pretty good.
Turn the camera on with the control dial, and you can almost instantly choose an exposure option other than all-auto: flashon, flash-off, night flash (shutter times down to 2 sec), bulb exposure, and bulb exposure with flash. We make no secret of our preference for...