Pentax Optio M20 Digital Camera Review
By Emily Raymond
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
February 06, 2007
Selling below $200, the Optio M20 aims to be an affordably priced digital camera that still provides a little more than the basics. The Pentax Optio M20 has 7 megapixels, a 3x optical zoom lens, and a 2.5-inch LCD screen. It also has a compelling movie mode and a set of automatic and scene modes to snap pictures.
Point-and-shooters will appreciate the ease of use on the M20. The interface is simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate through. For beginners, there is a designated “Green mode” that abridges the menus to 2 flash settings, 3 auto focus settings, and a self-timer option. The camera takes care of everything else so all you have to do is point and shoot.
The Pentax M20 doesn’t have much manual control since it does a lot on its own. It even adjusts its own LCD brightness by measuring the ambient light with a sensor atop the camera. This system did well in bright daylight, but it struggled to provide a good picture in low light. Along with the auto and Green modes, the M20 has an additional 11 scene modes. There aren’t any unique modes included. Instead, the scene modes include the usual fare of Portrait, Landscape, etc. There is a Blur Reduction mode that could be useful in low light – except for the fact that it truncates the image size to 4 megapixels or smaller.
There is a Frame Composite mode grouped with the scene modes, but it isn’t really a scene mode. It is more like a picture effect; it lets you choose between three cheesy frames including one that appears to be made of computer animated roses. There are other picture effects that can be added in the playback menu. Black and white, sepia, pink, red, purple, blue, green, yellow, and soft filters can be added along with a 13-step brightness adjustment. These look a bit tacky and aren’t for making anything serious, but this effect would be cool for directly printing birthday or greeting cards from the camera. The biggest problem with the filters is that it takes anywhere from 10-30 seconds of processing!
The 3.7 x 2.4 x 0.9-inch Pentax Optio M20 has a few manual controls. Its ISO can be set up to 1600, although the pictures are quite noisy when the higher sensitivity is activated. The auto focus mode can be set to multiple, spot, or a unique tracking AF mode that follows moving subjects. White balance and exposure compensation can also be set. When the white balance is manually set, the camera produces realistic colors.
The Pentax M20 has a 9-point auto focus system, but it doesn’t perform as well as it should. It delays for more than a half-second to take a picture and has serious problems focusing in low light. It does much better in the macro mode where it can focus as close as a centimeter.
Running on 2 AA batteries, the Optio M20 has a decent movie mode that records television-quality footage. 640 x 480 and 320 x 240-pixel options are available at 30 or 15 frames per second, which is what most compact digital cameras such as the Canon A540 offer. What other digital cameras don’t offer that the M20 has, though, is a set of color modes. The M20’s movies can be recorded in black and white or sepia. In addition, a digital anti-shake algorithm can be activated to snip a few bumps out of the video. This isn’t as effective as optical image stabilization, but it is better than nothing.
Pictures from this Optio can be easily printed to PictBridge or ImageLink printers. The M20 has a menu with plenty of options ranging from the paper size and type, to the print’s quality, and whether or not it should have a border. Overall, the Pentax Optio M20 offers a very basic physical interface. The body is plastic and has fairly cheap components. There is no optical viewfinder. If that's a feature you must have, the similarly priced Sony W30 has one along with a 2-inch, 85,000-pixel LCD that isn't as big as the M20's. The Pentax M20 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen that has still sub-par resolution of 115,000 pixels.
There are a few flourishes like digital filters and tracking auto focus on the 7.1-megapixel M20 that make it well worth the sub-$200 price tag. If you’re planning on really getting into photography, though, you may want to look for a digital camera that has more manual controls.
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