he retro styling of last year’s Olympus E-P1 sparked a lot of interest, and it seems Pentax wants in on the action. Its I-10 has echoes of yesteryear, and its SLR-style viewfinder hump makes it look like a serious piece of kit.
This hump is only for show, though. The flash could have been mounted elsewhere and there’s no viewfinder around the back. Nor are there the manual controls or RAW capture mode that keen photographers would expect. The design isn’t as luxurious in the flesh as we anticipated either, partly because the buttons on the back are grafted straight from Pentax’s budget compacts.
Advanced support for Eye-Fi cards (SDHC cards with built-in Wi-Fi) is a bonus, offering the option to turn off Wi-Fi and monitor connection status, but the 2.7in screen with its 230kpixel resolution is nothing special, save for its widescreen aspect ratio. That’s just the thing when recording 720p videos, but it makes photos appear small.
The I-10’s image quality is a mixed bag. Automatic exposures were rarely poor, but weren’t quite as balanced as other compact cameras managed. ISO 800 and 1600 shots displayed excessive noise, and the Auto ISO setting used ISO 800 for flash-lit shots when ISO 100 would have given better results.
The 5x zoom wide-angle lens has a disappointingly gloomy f/3.5-f/5.9 aperture, and while its corner-to-corner sharpness was excellent at most zoom settings, it trailed off towards the telephoto end. Autofocus was lethargic, and while the camera can capture four exposures in six seconds, there’s a lengthy five-second wait before it can repeat the trick. The 720p video mode is welcome, but videos were noisy in low light, optical zoom was unavailable, and sound quality poor.
Although the price of $289 may seem a bargain for the features on offer, it hides a camera of unsatisfying pedigree. Spending an extra $100 for the Canon Ixus 210 model makes far more sense.