Optio 330 p.I

Among the many interesting talks with Mr. Temmerman (then in charge at Pentax Europe) at Photokina 2000, he told me about the success of the Canon Ixus that "it’s a piece of jewelry that it happened to be a camera". Now it seems that Pentax learnt the lesson, making several cute pieces of jewelry that happen to take pictures, nice pictures. The Optio 330 is one of them, the first among Pentax digicams. How good is it? Here are my first impressions.

Hands on

It’s truly tiny and looks well built, like you would expect from a quality Pentax product. The Optio 330 features full auto operation, as well as manual exposure, manual focus, night scene (sort of an automatic bulb exposure), lots of specifications and also some gimmicks like the world time alarm.

I won’t explain all operations here, like some photo magazines are used to do, since the instruction manual has been written to that purpose. I just tell you that I had no problems at all in being in control very quickly after glancing through its manual. I shot about 100 pictures in the last two weeks and I never had to read the manual again. That says all about a successful user interface.

In the field

Tests published in the Internet tell that the Optio 330 images look a bit overprocessed, unnatural like TV images, and suffer from rough jpeg compression. Is it true? It’s true if you set best sharpness, which is obtained by applying excessive unsharp mask (some blame on Pentax for that). My advice is you set the sharpness to soft, which means no filter added to the taken image. Then you can always add the proper sharpening by Photoshop or other retouch software without ruining the original image file.

I took my first shots at the harbor. The tug shows very good color, resolution and sharpness, both at center and corners of image. The enlarged details show you that, with crisp details on the whole field and little if any color fringes: an excellent overall performance.

(go to sharpness page)

The second picture is almost unbelievable, but since we are accustomed to Pentax performance in backlit situations we’ll believe it. The Sun was direct against the lens, and the viewfinder was a mess of light and reflections. What would you expect from the image? Perfect, see by yourself!

(go to backlight page)

This said, what about comparing the Optio 330 quality to a good SLR with a good lens and film? OK, here is a picture of the S.Francesco church in Ravenna.

(go to comparison page)

In the backlit situation of the next picture (Municipality Palace) things are different, with SLR revenge. Details are always better in the film SLR pictures.

(go to comparison page)

What about lens distortion, flash and macro? (details here)

Storage card, battery life, PC connection

My main concern is about power consumption. A fresh, charged Li-ion rechargeable battery will last you about 40 to 50 pictures with flash off and LCD on (Pentax lies telling you that it will be 190). 40 is also the number of images that can be stored in a 64MB CompactFlash card when you shoot with best possible quality. In case you use the built-in flash, or you shoot outdoor in cold winter like I did these days, the battery will only last 12 to 15 pictures. I strongly recommend you to buy at least one spare battery together with your Optio 330, since it’s a dedicated type and it will be very hard to find another one when you’ll need it.

t02f25.jpg (16992 byte)

Speaking of picture storage, the supplied 16M CF card will store about 10 images at 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution and best quality, which can grow up to 106 pictures at VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixel) and then up to 228 at lower quality. An additional 32M or 64M flash card could be useful to extend camera storage capability, but a spare battery will be as much important.

Conclusions

Summing up, I’m very satisfied with the Optio 330. Its use is convenient and in most cases, its image quality exceeds what you really need. Since I bought the Optio 330 for Christmas, I always carry it in my pocket.

Gone the odd magenta cast over images of the older Pentax digicams, gone the questionable bulk and look of the HP/Pentax series cameras, featuring excellent look and build quality, giving excellent picture quality, Pentax can now fight against their competitors on equal terms. I believe at long last the new Optio series will be capable to establish Pentax as a major player in the digital arena.