Pentax Optio M30 review

Performance
Hassle-free point-and-shoot is enabled with a dedicated 'green mode' button. In green mode, you can choose to turn the flash off or use the different macro options, but all menu and programmable options are locked. The automatic mode is capable in good lighting conditions, and face recognition works reasonably well without being outstanding. More complicated scenes do tend to overwhelm the autofocus, which also struggles in low light. The autofocus tends to fail in the dark due to the lack of a focus-assist lamp.

The M30 takes reasonable pictures when set to the fully automatic 'green mode', but also provides access to some manual settings

Unfortunately, shake reduction mode employs the automatic fast shutter/high ISO combination, rendering it less useful when light is poor. Low-light sensitivity goes up to ISO 3,200 but shots at that level are unusable; noise in darker conditions creeps in from ISO 800 upwards. Noise reduction software that tries to reduce the speckles only serves to muddy remaining detail.

The M30's struggle with low light isn't helped by the level of compression that crunches files down to a memory-friendly size. Even in our typically lit lab tests, when colour was produced well and response time was respectable, image quality wasn't always up to scratch, presumably due to compression. We also encountered some distortion from the lens, especially when zoomed in.

Conclusion
The Pentax Optio M30 is a super-slim and highly affordable compact. Picture quality is fine for Web and small prints but mediocre in low light. A fully automatic one-touch 'green mode' makes point-and-shoot snapping easy, but digital image stabilisation is not the best system and leads to problems in all but the best lighting conditions.

Some interesting onscreen features to correct the brightness of your pictures give it an edge over similarly basic budget cameras like the Olympus FE-230 or Casio Exilim EX-Z70.

Many of the M30's attributes are cheerfully childish, but it is worth considering over the similar-featured E30 for more style-conscious younger photographers.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield