Pentax Optio X review

Flash range extends out to 12 feet in the wide-angle position when set at Auto ISO but to only 6 feet when the telephoto is cranked out. You won't be shooting flash pictures at your next concert, even if you're seated in the front row. Flash modes are limited to off, forced on, forced on with red-eye, automatic, and automatic with red-eye.

The Optio has a useful time-lapse mode for shooting from 2 to 99 pictures at intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 4 minutes, with a start-time delay of as much as 24 hours. Digital effects include black-and-white, sepia, red, pink, purple, blue, green, and yellow filters, as well as a postshot brightness control. Pictures can also be trimmed, downsampled, or copied in the camera. If you shoot sound movies (limited to 320x240 pixels at 15fps), you can save individual movie frames as still pictures, divide a single movie into several clips, or combine clips into a longer sequence.

The Pentax Optio X's performance leaves a lot to be desired, especially in the shot-to-shot-time arena, as well as in the continuous-shooting benchmarks. It took a full 4.7 seconds to awaken this Pentax from its slumber to take a first shot, then the lethargy set in. Below-average shot-to-shot times of 5.7 seconds (7.0 seconds with flash) seemed even longer when we pressed the Review button after taking several shots, and we had to watch a "Data being recorded" reminder for a few seconds before we could begin checking out our images.

The stingy buffer size crippled the Optio's burst mode shooting, too. In our worst-case continuous-shooting test at maximum resolution and best quality, this Pentax was quite willing to take photos for as long as the shutter release was pressed but only at intervals as long as 5 seconds per picture--more of a bust than a burst. Reducing resolution to 640x480 pixels at maximum JPEG compression yielded roughly 1 shot per second for about a minute. The golf-swing analysis mode was equally anemic, providing only a 4-shot sequence in a single frame where many other digital cameras squeeze as many as 16 shots into a full-resolution picture.

If your hopes of using this ultracompact as a sports/action tool haven't evaporated by now, shutter lag measuring 0.9 second under high-contrast lighting and, with no focus-assist light to help, ballooning to 1.9 seconds when faced with more-challenging low-contrast lighting.

The Pentax Optio X's image quality was mediocre at best, with less sharpness than we expected from a 5-megapixel camera and with abundant JPEG artifacts visible at even the lowest compression settings. While exposures were actually quite good, with detail--what there was of it--in both highlights and shadows, it was easy to blow out the lighter tones, and purple fringing was easy to detect. Red eyes were frequently a problem with flash, even when the preflash red-eye prevention was activated. Flesh tones were generally good, but the automatic white-balance controls frequently lent a slight yellow cast to many indoor pictures and a blue tint to outdoor shots.