December 25th, 2007Review Of The Pentax Optio A10 Digital Cam
The Pentax Optio A10 is clean eye-candy enfold in its ultra-compact body with curved-out limits. It’s just so attractive that you would watt to get one of these just so you can take it around with you, and pop it out whenever you sense the require. This is the camera you show your friends and wristwatch them do the “So Cuuute” bit, while you flash that “Yeah, I know” smile. But how does the rest of it live up?
Performance
The Pentax Optio A10 produced some pretty good results in most external conditions. In it’s default color setting it made the images look livelier by saturating the colors a bit, which is what most solid digital cameras do these days. Let’s face it, people like bright happy colors! When it comes to vacation photos or photos full for parties, family purpose and on the whole any other informal event, the camera will do great.
But in principle speaking, there are a few flaws I found with the image output. I talk about above that the camera tends to saturate colors in its snapshots, but that doesn’t work too well when shooting colors that be already bright. With colors like bright red, the camera over-saturated the colors to the extent that the particulars of the subject were cut downward and were replaced through JPEG density marks, when seen in full view.
The auto and the set white balance settings were pretty much spot on and I didn’t feel the need to physically correct the white balance under most circumstances. The images clicked in the lowest ISO setting (ISO 50), showed great silent superiority. In fact, the camera showed very little noise in all ISO settings, except ISO 400.
The Optio A10 makes good use of whatever light is available, which is what makes it great for carrying around for just about any event. The shot above was taken at night using a tripod and the A10’s “Night Scenery” scene mode, and as you can see, the results were attractive good. The sensor took full benefit of any, light that was available and didn’t cooperation on the details. Still the noise height was kept relatively low. It’s good to know that the scene modes are well optimized to give a poise of recital and quality.
Another negative worth end out is that the shot-to-shot speed of the camera is pretty slow. I can immobile forgive that in a starter level point-and-click camera, but mid-range cameras should totally be optimized to give you fast clicking speeds.
Build
The Optio A10 is tiny at 89 x 55 x 23mm, and thanks to its miniscule Li-Ion battery; it consider as little as 145gms. The in general metal body feels tight and secures enough to take a bit of man-handling, though I wouldn’t personally advocate that.
The 2.5 inch LCD screen (232,000 pixels) takes up most of the back space the length of with a few navigational and useful buttons. While the LCD performs attractive well in most illumination circumstances, it does go pretty much flat under through sunlight. Since the camera doesn’t have an alternate optical viewfinder, this can become pretty not convenient, especially when you’re out at a beach or at a picnic.
The buttons are all at easy to reach places and are adequately responsive too, which makes the camera convenient enough for single-handed operation. There really isn’t much to complain about the Optio A10’s build.
Video
The immense part about the Optio A10 is that it captures video in DivX format, which is pretty good, bearing in mind it captures at 640×480 resolution and 30FPS without dwell in too much space. The quality of the video is great, it captures fast moving objects pretty much without jitters, and even the sound advantage gives you nothing to criticize about.
Features
Feature-wise the Pentax Optio A10 is a fun-cam that kids and college students would particularly love to have around. Besides the regular effects and scene modes, the camera features frames mode with 3 frames superimposes for your photos. You can add more frames to the camera from the wide selection available here. It’s a fun feature that a lot of casual users will be grateful for.
The more serious users may not be too happy with the lack of manual features in this cam. You can set the white balance manually, which worked great for accurately setting the insignia according to the lighting state in our tests. You can also manually adjust the ISO understanding location, which variety from ISO 50 to ISO 400.
The Optio A10, takes movies at a maximum size of 8 megapixels, with an additional support of HDTV aspect ratio (16×9) photos. It offers a modest 3X optical zoom, which is kind of sensible for a low-end model, but seems inadequate on a mid-range model akin to this one. Image stabilization is a much valued addition that will help reduce hand jitters.
The camera also supports voice footage and video shooting with sound, but more on that later.
When shelving out Rs. 23,490 for a digital camera, you can normally expect more than an ultra-compact camera. But the Optio A10 offers some great features like 8 megapixel image size, exceptional scene modes and welcoming usability, which makes the camera price a bit additional acceptable. It comes bundled with a carry case and a mini tripod, which is forever useful. The bottom-line is, that this is an outstanding starter level camera as long as you have profound pockets.
