Pentax Optio T20

Opinion: What a HUGE disappointment. My company recently supplied me with this camera to use on a daily basis for my job. I'm a rabid fan of my Pentax istDS, and have been using Pentax point and shoots for my job for the past five years. Unfortunately, this is the worst to come along. It's a great looking little camera with a big beautiful touch screen, so what's the problem?

1) The screen freezes during focus lock. I can't begin to explain how annoying this is. You need to recompose every shot after focus lock, because either yourself or your subject is going to shift a little bit. Trying to time an expression or anything else means you're also starting from scratch.

2) focus is slooooooow. Aside from that being annoying all on its own, it makes problem #1 even worse.

3) flash recycle/charge time is unbelievably slow. I am constantly waiting around for the flash to charge. The way this works out logistically is that I'll half press to focus, and after I get a focus lock I'll be shown a red flash symbol until it finishes charging, at which point I press the shutter the rest of the way to take the picture. Unfortunately, half the time it won't take the picture unless I re-focus which is made all the more annoying becuase of problems #1 and 2.

4) macro mode. Wow. I'm almost impressed by how awful this camera is in macro. First off you can't zoom at all in macro mode. The focal length is locked at the widest setting. Couple that with the fact that you can't get within 6 inches of your subject and there's absolutely nothing close-up about your close-up shots.

All of these things combine to make this camera a HUGE chore to use on a regular basis, which is a shame, because if you can get the thing to focus on what you want, you are gonna wind up with a nice picture. The image quality is actually very good. That said, if I had any choice in the matter, I'd return this camera in a second. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with this until we replace it with the next "latest and greatest". Ironically, I'd gladly trade this for the Optio 33L we were using four years ago.

Hope that this helps somebody avoid making a bad choice.

Opinion: Having owned a few compact pentax cameras in the past I didn't expect to be disappointed on this occassion. However this must be the worst compact I have ever taken a picture with.

The battery cover keeps sliding open when holding the camera. It freezes up on many occassions after taking a picture (the only way I found to fix this is to pop open the battery cover and remove the SD card - however there is a risk of losing all your photos on the card doing this)

The picure quality was terrible especially for portrait shots where focusing took ages and the pan focus didn't work very well.

This has been a real disappointment as I had a choice between this and a A20 and only went for this camera because of a touch screen. If you have the same choice go for the A30 now as they were great series of cameras (I had an A10 previously).

Opinion: I have been using this camera on my travels for 10 months now and am very happy with the results.

The interface is very intuative making the camera quick and easy to use. The program mode gives a good number of options for those shots that the automatice settings don't get quite right.

I have found the image quality to be perfectly good enough for printing up to A4 size and viewing on a PC.

The best feature of this camera is its size. It fits into a pocket like a phone so it's always to hand for those 'quick snap' shots.