The first impression is very good, with the camera featuring a much quicker response in releasing the shutter, compared to my Optio 330. That’s important while shooting action, and the Optio 330 is not lightning quick for sure. When I bought my Optio 330, I thought that all digital cameras in the amateur segment were slow in taking pictures compared to film cameras, but then I discovered that’s not so true. Now the Optio 230 improves a lot over the older models.

In the next picture I compared "low" and "high" sharpness in menu settings. One could believe that high sharpness is always better than low, but don’t you ask the reason for having such a setting available? No, soft is not just for romantic-style portraiture. The problem is that such higher sharpness is obtained by adding a strong contrast mask to the picture, thus ruining true subtle detail in favor of apparent overall picture sharpness. In the Optio 330, in my opinion the added mask is excessive and I advise you to set the sharpness option to "soft". That doesn’t mean you add a soft digital filter, but that you simply store an unprocessed image, to which you’ll then add the proper contrast mask by a photo-retouching software on your PC, where you can enlarge details and decide the proper amount of processing.

The bell tower of the St. Apollinare church gave me the opportunity to compare low and high sharpness settings. As you can see in the 2X enlarged areas, the higher sharpness is again a bit too much invasive, even though not so destructive as it is in the Optio 330. In this case my advice is you set the sharpness to "high" in case you never want to process image on PC and want to print small, sharp pictures. For general use, the medium sharpness setting could be a good compromise, while if you always want to get the most out of your pictures, set the sharpness to "low" for shooting, and then "tune" the proper contrast mask on each picture by your favorite image processing program.