Colours are slightly undersaturated, especially in portrait shots. Apart from this the A30 provides Pentax's best picture quality, with crisp sharpening. Resolution and detail is impressive, with noise reduction avoiding softening up the image, at all but the highest ISO setting.
Higher light sensitivity, or ISO, settings are intended to allow cameras to operate in lower light conditions. Unfortunately there's a trade-off in speckly noise as the ISO increases. The A30 is no exception. Noise reduction keeps images acceptable at ISO 400, but above that images are unattractively noisy, or at maximum ISO 1,600, blurry through excessive noise reduction.
As always, these higher settings are best avoided. This is true for dynamic range as well. The A30 distinguishes detail and colour well in lighter and darker areas of the image, but this suffers as ISO increases.
Unusually, the A30 shoots video in DivX video format, which has the advantage of compressing files into significantly smaller file sizes. Unfortunately the advantage is cancelled out by jerky video lacking dynamic range, while the zoom cannot be used during filming.
Conclusion
Despite a few flaws, notably in video quality, the Pentax Optio
A30 is a strong compact camera. The plasticky buttons and cutesy menus
don't do justice to the excellent manual options, shooting flexibility
and respectable picture quality.
The A30 may have an average-sized screen and zoom, but it trumps the cheaper BenQ DC C1050 on image quality and is substantially cheaper than 10-megapixel cameras with extra features, such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3, which offers 10x zoom and a 76mm (3-inch) screen. Modest it may be, but the A30 is Pentax's best compact.
Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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