Auto Mode
The auto picture mode, as the name suggests, puts all of the decision making for controls into the camera’s hands. It picks the ISO settings, the white balance settings, and everything else. We found that, in the limited testing that we were able to do for this First Impressions Review, the camera made good decisions when shooting indoors under florescent light, but we didn’t have an opportunity to test it under daylight or other lighting conditions.
Movie Mode
Movies can be recorded at 640 x 480 or 320 x 240 pixels, both at 30 frames per second. The movies are saved as DivX files, and the only limit to the length of the movie is the size of the memory card. But you can’t do that much when taking a movie: the zoom and focus controls are locked while recording. The shake reduction feature is also disabled, and the mono sound that’s recorded with the movie is rather noisy. All of this means that it’s only usable for short videos. It’s certainly no hybrid model, and it’s not going to replace your camcorder. You can, however, save individual frames from a movie within the camera.
Drive / Burst Mode
The A10 has a continuous shooting mode that took around 2 frames a second (Pentax was unable to supply the official spec). With a fast SD card (such as the SanDisk Extreme 256MB card I used for testing) the camera was able to keep shooting for at least 10 seconds, enough for even the most indecisive photographer. This is not exceptional performance, but certainly acceptable for snapshooters.
Playback Mode
The playback modes are adequate, but basic. You can display thumbnails of up to 9 images at once and zoom in up to 8x (useful for checking focus on an image). You can’t, however, filter the images by date or time, but you can create a basic slide show for playback on the screen or through the composite video output.
The A10 also offers some in-camera editing options, such as resize, trim, and red-eye correction. Users can also choose to protect images from accidental deletion and add voice memos.
Custom Image Presets
The A10 has 11 scene modes which cover the usual gamut of shooting situations: night, landscape, flower, portrait, surf & snow, candle light, text, food, sport, and pet. These alter settings such as exposure and ISO for the situation, but there’s no way to tweak the settings yourself.
What the A10 doesn’t have is a custom scene mode, a nice surprise included with a few other compacts on the market. Although the camera will preserve any changes you’ve made to the settings when you turn the power off, there is no way to create groups of settings that you can quickly switch between. This is a noticeable omission for a camera that’s supposedly a higher-end point-and-shoot.
