Pentax Optio Z10 review

While most camera companies were designing cameras with sliding lens covers to mimic Sony's T-series cameras, Pentax didn't jump on that bandwagon. But now that sliding covers have become a regular part of the digital camera design aesthetic, Pentax has its own spin on the slide.

Behind that cover, the Optio Z10 has a 7x optical zoom lens that covers an equivalent range of 38mm-to-266mm and f/3.5-to-f/5.4. That should provide a long reach for a pocketable camera, though you may yearn for a wider lens when shooting group portraits. Most of the camera's other features aren't exceptional, though for around £160, you can't expect the world.

Design
You don't often see a black Pentax compact camera, but the Z10 definitely represents a different direction for the company. Still, though, it feels like a Pentax, sporting a reserved, classy look, instead of trying to appear slick as so many compact cameras do.

The button layout is happily simple and even eschews a power button. Instead, the sliding cover turns the camera on and off. Other than the shutter button, the rest of the buttons sit to the right of the camera's 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen.

In addition to the usual four directional buttons that double as flash, macro, self-timer and shooting mode controls, there's also a small green button that serves as the trash button in playback mode and can be customised to activate exposure compensation, image size or quality, or white balance. The button's default activates the fully automatic green shooting mode.

Features
Pentax didn't include optical or sensor-shift image stabilisation in the Z10, instead relying on ISO boosting digital image stabilisation to combat blur cause by shaky hands. Of course, there aren't many cameras with optical image stabilisation in this price range, and none of them include 7x optical zoom lenses.

While Pentax includes face detection in the Z10 -- they refer to it as face recognition -- you might get confused when trying to activate it. The manual doesn't include the term 'face recognition' in the index, so you'd have to hunt through the manual to discover that face detection is only active in either the Natural Skin Tone or Portrait scene modes.

This makes sense, since the idea of face detection is to help with portraits and these are both portrait scene modes. However, we wish Pentax would include in the index any of the terms it uses to describe the camera's key features.

Performance
While the Optio Z10 did well in our shutter lag test, it proved sluggish waking up and in between shots. The camera took 2.2 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG. Thereafter, it took 3 seconds between images with the flash turned off. With the flash turned on, the camera took 3.2 seconds between images.

Shutter lag was very impressive, measuring 0.4 seconds in our high contrast test and 0.9 seconds in our low contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. In continuous shooting mode, we were able to capture an average of 1.6 frames per second. You can't call that exceptional, but it's not bad for a camera in this price range.