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After quite a few weeks of reading online and hardcopy digital camera reviews, talking to people and even going onto an online Pentax forum, I’ve finally decided on my new camera – a Pentax Optio A30.
I chose this Pentax compact camera because it has most of the features that are important to me, e.g. up to 10 megapixels (so I will have the option to print up to A3 sized images), built in shake reduction, video and sound recording, some manual controls and good macro. The ACDSee software (included) for PENTAX image viewer/image management is very sweet and user friendly. I’ve just been using it to crop and re-size images for my blog and its a heck of a lot more easy and convenient than taking everything through Photoshop.
The only thing it lacks is an optical view finder. I started out with a Pentax SLR film camera and still miss framing up my shots through a view finder. I have used a couple of compact digital cameras with an electronic view finder, but there is invariably parallax error, in which what you see is not what you get. One contender to the Pentax that I came across in my research is the new Ricoh GX-100. It has an removable EVF which offers 100% viewfinder coverage with no parallax, but its only been out a couple of weeks and I want to wait and see how it performs in the reviews.
So, my new Pentax Optio A30 arrived yesterday and actually it is the first brand new that camera I have ever owned in my life. Over the past 25 years I have borrowed various and sundry cameras from various and sundry boyfriends – thanks Guys!
OK, enough of the geeky tech talk. I charged the battery and took my first few trial shots inside and around my house yesterday. Its about the size of a deck of cards and fits right in the palm of my hand or slips easily into my pocket. I’ve been shooting so far on the Auto mode.
My final conclusion? A sweet little camera.
