Cameras, like many current gizmos, are bought as much on the grounds of style and fashion as features and performance. Thus one of the popular trends at the moment is to include a waterproof model in your compact digital range and Pentax has just upgraded its Optio W60 to keep up with another chic demand; the ‘rugged' approach.

You can discern the immediate changes by looking at the exterior. Gone are the rounded corners at the front, to be replaced by solid rubber ‘brackets' which give the overall impression, on the silver model we tested, of a business or military attaché case. There's further shock-absorbent material on the inside so that it can now survive a drop of up to one metre onto a hard surface.

All the joints have been tightened up so you can now dive down to five metres (compared to the previous four) and shoot continuously for up to two hours underwater. The battery and SD compartment in the base has an internal rubber seal and an external switch which provides complete protection, and the lens has a Super Protect coating to help repel water and grime.

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As the W80 is clearly targeted at the adventurous holiday maker, the camera will also operate successfully in temperatures as low as -10°C and it's designed to be stubbornly dustproof. However, fingerprints on both the lens and the 2.5-inch LCD were noticeable and persistent.

A glance at the back shows the control layout is identical to the W60: as well as the usual D-pad, menu, playback and zoom rocker, there are dedicated buttons for Smile Detection and Green setting. The smaller buttons are fiddlier to press, which could be annoying in snowy or watery conditions, yet you do have a wide range of scene modes (21 in all) complete with icons and descriptions.

It's a shame Pentax decided to leave the tripod mount at the far right of the base when it would have been simple to have it more centrally positioned. The Super Macro mode, however, is very welcome, allowing close-ups from just 1cm away, and there's a new D-Range setting to compensate for over- and under-exposure.

Like the W60, the W80 has a (non-telescopic) 5x optical zoom lens but the digital zoom has expanded from 5.7x to 6.25x. Similarly, the sensor is now 12.1-megapixel rather than 10-megapixel. The image stabilisation system is digital as opposed to optical, relying on boosting the ISO up to a mammoth 6400 and using higher shutter speeds. HD-proportioned 1280 x 720 movie clips can be captured in 16:9 at 30fps but there's no HDMI output to play them back on your TV and you can't use the zoom when filming.

As for the quality of the images, we noticed a distinct softness around the edges of the frame and there are definite noise issues by the time you reach ISO 400. Colours, too, appeared muted as though they were all shot underwater, while paradoxically the underwater photos were sharper than we anticipated.

If you need a tough little compact digital for that scuba holiday or a bit of snowboarding, then this upgrade from Pentax is certainly rugged enough, but for the price the overall quality of the images - except those taken underwater - is unexpectedly disappointing.