February 15th, 2008Review Of Pentax Optio E40
Pentax’s Optio series is just one of the many dig cams planning to make a attempt at apparent customer supplies. Having had a chance to put the Optio E40 though its paces, here are my findings.
Design
The Optio E40 is a compact digicam, or is it? I’d say it’s just like any you’ve seen. On the top you’ll find the close release and power buttons. On one side is the USB slot and on the other side is the strap holder. It has a 2.4 inch LCD display at the rear and like other digicams the zoom keys on the top followed by a dried balcony key and a five-way nav-pad with options.
The Menu and Erase / Green Mode key are located at the bottom of the rear panel. Beneath the camera you’ll find a stand slot, crib slot and battery section (which also houses the SD card). On the whole it’s not a bad-looking camera. Even with the batteries it’s still fairly lightweight and very trouble-free to carry approximately.
Performance
The E40 offer a diversity of options with regard to shooting modes. If you don’t want to get too technical, or if you’re departing to give it to a kid to play with for a bit, the Green Mode is the way to go. It simplifies things a great deal.
As I said, there are plenty of preset modes, all neatly depicted with appropriate icons. Among the options is a ‘Sports mode’ that helps you capturing images of moving objects. The E40 manages to work that out quite well. There’s also an option to take pictures of surf and snow. Not that too many of us would ever need to take pictures of snow. The major issue with this camera is the vignette effect almost all landscape/outdoor shots seem to acquire. In the photos you’ll notice the corners have a curved-like darker tint.
On the plus side, worldwide images look really good at first glance with the colors seemingly vibrant. On closer examination, however, you will notice that there is still some graininess. The camera seems to have a difficulty focusing on major colors like yellow and red.
The E40 does run to pick all the close light and give you rather bright night shots with colors that remain decently intact, but the images are still grainy as hell with too much sound. But when you think about it, this isn’t that high-end a camera, so it’s all good.
Features
Pentax has managed to incorporate a few editing features into the E40. You have a choice of resizing, rotating, and cropping images. It even allows you to add color filters and brighten images, as well as protect images so you won’t delete them by mistake. There’s also a facility for footage voice memos over the images.
Video capture is in .AVI format and this may be the one of the improved features of the camera. I even managed to record some fireworks at night from a coldness with the zoom and I have to say it looked quite good on PC playback.
Battery
Recurrent travelers may not be happy about the batteries. Though I’m all for the “get a battery, anywhere” slogan that applies to cameras like the E40 (which runs on two AA batteries). The problem is even Duracell doesn’t seem to stand up to the use power of this camera. It eats away into the battery too quickly. After a bit of testing, we feel rechargeable cells are the way to go. Get yourself at least two pairs and make sure they’re fully charged before venturing out.
The E40 is not up to the mark. It delivers only average performance. Battery life is a subject, so you might want to believe twice before you pick one up. Since the camera is ho-hum on the whole, it’s not something I can advocate without reservation. One would naturally expect more when paying Rs 12,990 for 8.1 mega pixels.
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January 24th, 2010 at 2:30 am
This was interesting.