Pentax Optio T30 digital camera review

Can Pentax improve on the Optio T20?

17 April 2007 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

No sooner as Pentax released the Optio T20, the company has upgraded the camera to the Optio T30.

The new model still sports the large 3-inch touchscreen as before with a slight working to the design with the addition of more curves and a slimmer approach (down by 0.5mm to 19mm thick).

That touchscreen for those not familiar with the T20 dominates the back of the camera's design and gives enough room for big fingers to touch the on-screen menu.

In practice, it's so logical to use, we can see why Pentax has designed to keep the screen as the camera's main focus. As before press the screen and large clear buttons appear so you can change the scene mode, the megapixel count, the flash options and much more.

The touchscreen is also useful when it comes to scrolling through the images and simply pressing the screen to the left or right to move on to the next image.

The most notable improvement of the T30 over the T20 has been the speed at which the camera operates. One of our biggest annoyances with the T20 was the delay when we had pressed the scroll on button too many times to quickly. Here and that problem seems to have been resolved, and although the problem hasn't gone completely it's considerably better.

Like before everyone we showed was impressed with the touchscreen and also found it incredibly easy to use.

Inside and the megapixel count is virtually the same; 7 megapixels compared to 7.1 and the T30 also throws Face Recognition AF and AE into the mix, as well as upping the ISO setting up to a noise fantastic 3200.

When it comes to image quality, it was great, the 7 megapixel sensor gave us no problem with noise apart from shooting at 3200 (something to be expected), and images where bright, crisp and colour balance good in either the snow or bar afterwards.

Aside from the delay in viewing images on the T20 our other biggest gripe was the time it look from pressing the button to the picture actually being taken. Like most other things on the camera, this too has been improved considerably.

Verdict

We loved the T20, however we didn't love the fact that it took so long to take pictures that you miss the action.

Perhaps, we would like to think so, listening to our criticisms, Pentax has gone away and virtually fixed all our grumbles while keeping the image quality top notch.

A vast improvement making this a great rather than good camera.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Pentax
Price as reviewed: £200
The good: That 3-inch touchscreen, picture quality
The bad: Still some delay in taking pictures, software still gets confused from time to time
Quick verdict: A vast improvement over the Optio T20 making this a great rather than good camera
Score