Pentax Optio A10 First Impressions Review

Viewfinder
The A10 doesn’t have a viewfinder, though this is becoming increasingly common on compacts and point-and-shoots. Framing is done through the 2.5-inch LCD screen.

LCD Screen
The screen certainly makes up for the absence of a viewfinder. At 2.5 inches, it’s not the biggest we’ve seen, but it’s pretty bright and with 232,000 pixels, it’s easy to see details in the photos. The angle of view is reasonable; two or three people at once could look at the photos on the screen and see them just fine. We weren’t able to test it outdoors, but TFT screens usually perform well under sunlight.

Flash
The Optio A10’s small flash is located above and to the left of the lens. Pentax quotes the flash range at between 16 feet (at its widest setting) and 8.2 feet (zoomed all the way out), but these measurements seem a little optimistic. We found that faces more than six feet away were a little dark when we used the flash. But that’s actually acceptable and on par with most similarly priced cameras. The coverage was adequate at the wide angle setting, although there were darker spots in the corners.


Zoom Lens
The lens is a 3x, 7.9 to 23.7mm optical zoom lens built by SMC Pentax with a maximum aperture of f/2.8. That’s equivalent to a 37.5 to 112.5mm on a 35mm film camera, and a reasonable range for a camera of this class. Zooming across the range is smooth, with no noticeable stutters or stops. There’s also a 4x digital zoom available, but not surprisingly the image quality suffers, especially at the higher digital magnifications.