Auto Mode
There are two auto modes: Simple mode (where everything is completely automatic) and Program, which gives the user a little more control, such as control over the metering mode. This control is limited as there is no way to directly control shutter speed or aperture. The Optio E10 being a budget point-and-shoot camera, however, the exclusion of a control like this is not surprising.
The auto mode is a snap to use; as it should be on a camera of this class.
Movie Mode
The movie mode records video at a resolution of 320 x 240 at 20 frames per second in DivX format. This is a little below the now-usual 30 frames per second, and the movies did suffer, with some jerky motion. But they are adequate for short clips and mono sound is recorded as well. Inclusion of a 640 x 480 option would have been fantastic, but other models at this price point that do include such an option record it at an even jerkier 10 fps. This seems to be the happiest medium Pentax could find. One fortunate aspect of it: there’s no limit on the length of movies that can be recorded, other than what the memory card can store.
Drive / Burst Mode
The burst mode on the Optio E10 is a simple continuous mode. In our limited tests, we found that it managed fewer than 2 frames per second and was able to keep shooting for several seconds. A burst mode on a camera this inexpensive at all is surprising, so we won’t begrudge its low-average performance.
Playback Mode
The playback button on the back of the camera puts it into playback mode. This allows you to go from a thumbnail of 9 images to a 4x zoom in on the image. But the thumbnails are a tad small, and the grainy screen makes it hard to see any details. The 4x zoom is also a little less than some comparable cameras offer (8x exists on some) so you can’t get in close to look for fine details. Not that the poor LCD screen would permit such a thing anyway.
The E10 also lets users protect pictures from accidental erasure and resize images to a smaller size. Other than a slide show option (which excludes any exotic wipes, fades or transition options), these are the playback mode’s only other features. It’s a very pared-down feature set, and we were a little disappointing that other options, like crop or jump, were not included.
Custom Image Presets
Five shooting modes are available on the dial at the top of the screen: Landscape (which opens the aperture up), Night Scene (which slows down the shutter speed), Portrait, Sport (which speeds the shutter speed up), and Movie. This is significantly less than the range offered by many other cameras (10 or so has become the norm) but for a very basic point-and-shoot, it’s average, and even though it may be missing modes like Fireworks or Beach, the essentials are there.
