Pentax Optio A30 Review
PENTAX Corporation has announced the new 10 million pixel PENTAX Optio A30, a compact digital camera featuring 10.0 effective megepixels, enabling for photography of fine, high-quality images. The Optio A30, which is a camera in PENTAX’s top class, also has enhanced anti-shake functions.
New LCD monitor that is bright and easily viewable. The Optio A30 is newly equipped with a high-intensity LCD monitor with an LCD booster function that makes it possible to improve the brightness of the screen as necessary.
FEATURES
– The front of the camera houses the lens, self-timer lamp/auxiliary AF lamp, microphone, flash and remote control receiver.
– The rear of the A30 is taken up largely by the monitor; zoom, playback, OK/display, green and menu buttons, and the four-way controller are also located here.
– The top of the camera is home to the shutter release button, power switch/power indicator lamp and shake reduction preview button.
– The camera bottom includes the battery/memory card cover and a threaded tripod socket.
– On the camera’s right side are found the terminal cover for the PC/AV and DC input terminals as well as the lug for the camera strap. A speaker is found on the left side.
– Auto Mode
The A30 comes out of the box with default settings for JPEG still capture at 7MB with a “better” quality image. When shooting in “auto”, the A30 selects the most appropriate capture mode from its “Normal”, “Night Scene”, “Landscape” or “Portrait” modes
Movie defaults are 640 pixels and “best” quality at 30 frames per second.
– Additional Shooting Modes
Besides “auto”, the A30 permits the shooter to select from three “exposure modes” or twelve “picture modes”.
– Exposure Compensation
The A30 permits exposure compensation of +/- 2 EV in 1/3 EV increments.
– Light Metering
Multi-segment metering is the default setting, but center-weighted and spot metering options are available.
– Focus/Macro Focus
Autofocus is the standard mode, but Macro, Super Macro, Pan, Infinity and Manual modes may be selected. Normal focus range is from about 13.8 inches out to infinity. Macro/Super macro focus can be as close as about 2.4 inches out to about 15.75 inches.
– Monitor
The A30 features a 2.5 inch monitor with 232,000 pixels and a wide angle of view – up to 160 degrees horizontally and vertically per Pentax. In good lighting the monitor is a joy – great color and resolution for image composition or editing. While adjustable for brightness, the monitor is hard to use in bright sunlight, particularly with subjects that lack contrast. There is no optical viewfinder.
– Flash
Pentax lists a flash range out to about 23 feet at wide angle, and nearly 11.5 feet at telephoto, figures which are accurate based on my experience. The A30 flash features excellent color reproduction, and there are red eye reduction settings available as well as a red eye compensation feature that allows post processing to remove red eye that does appear.
– Color
The A30 can record movies in black and white or sepia tones as well as full color. Still images are recorded in color, but Pentax has included a “Digital Filter” feature in the camera that allows selected images to be post processed using a number of colored filters, color extraction filters, a soft filter and a fisheye filter. Color, B&W and Sepia filtered shots follow.
Image sharpness, saturation and contrast may be increased or decreased via camera menu, but visually there is not a striking difference to my eye between the default and increased levels.
– ISO
The A30 permits the selection of five ranges of auto ISO (64-100, 64-200, 64-400, 64-800, 64-1600) as well as the individual 64, 100, 200, 400, 800 or 1600 ISO sensitivities. With everyday shots that included a portion of the sky, images at ISO 64, 100 and 200 were essentially equal, with 400 not far behind. Noise became more readily apparent at 800 and 1600 settings.
– White Balance
In addition to “auto” white balance, the A30 has settings for daylight, shade, tungsten and fluorescent light sources. A manual (custom) setting is also offered. I used “auto” for the images in this review and found color reproduction to be good in a variety of outdoor lighting ranging from early morning clear to heavy clouds and fog.
– Battery Performance
Pentax lists a battery life of 150 shots for the A30, but my experience fell well short of that figure – I got about 100 shots before the battery died. I was doing a lot of menu surfing to learn and try the many features on the camera, and this no doubt caused battery life to suffer. Folks who are accustomed to the camera and just shoot will probably come much closer to the stated performance, but if I was going on an all-day shoot with the A30 I’d have several spare batteries. The A30 can’t accept alternate battery types such as AA or AAA.
– Shutter Performance
The A30 is credited with a .02 second shutter lag by Pentax, and shot-to-shot single frames in 1.3 seconds (acquire focus, shoot, re-acquire focus, shoot). There is also a “continuous shooting mode” setting that takes pictures continuously while the shutter button is depressed; shooting may be continued until the memory card or internal memory is full, exposure for the shots are determined by the first shot of the series and speed depends on image size and quality levels.
With a SanDisk Extreme III memory card on board, 10 megapixel size and “best” quality selected, the A30 took 15 shots in 13.0 seconds. I arbitrarily stopped at 15 – the camera would have kept going. Suffice it to say, very impressive performance (with a high-performance memory card).
– Lens Performance
A30 images at the wide and telephoto ends of the spectrum appeared pretty uniformly sharp across the entire frame. There is some barrel distortion (straight lines bow out from center of image) present at the wide end which might cause a sharp-eyed viewer to notice a “bent” line here or there. There is very little chromatic aberration (purple fringing) in high contrast boundary areas of images. All in all, an impressive performance for such a compact device.
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Read the full review of the Pentax Optio A30.
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