Pentax K10D with 18-55mm lens review

Pentax's flagship digital SLR has been available for a few months, but recent price reductions have motivated us to take a closer look.

It's fairly heavy at 710g but feels sturdy and comfortable to hold, and is well protected from the elements with 72 water and dust shields. On paper, it competes with Canon's EOS 400D, Olympus's E-410, Sony's A100 and Nikon's D40x in terms of resolution, continuous shooting speed and price. However, various other features put it in a different class.

Image stabilisation is built in to the CCD (a feature matched only by Sony's A100). We found that it gave a 60 per cent success rate at eliminating blur when shooting with a 1/15s shutter speed at the full telephoto zoom setting. Other stabilisation systems do better, but it's still a significant improvement over no stabilisation at all. The same mechanism is also used to shake dust from the sensor.

The K10D's physical controls go way beyond those of the competition. It has two command dials for simultaneous access to shutter speed and aperture, and settings are displayed on a backlit, passive LCD screen on the top of the camera. This screen means the 21/2in LCD isn't required during shooting, which accounts for the camera's fantastic battery life. There are dedicated buttons for exposure bracketing, exposure compensation, RAW shooting and exposure lock, plus switches for exposure- and focus-metering options, auto/manual focus and to preview the depth-of-field through the viewfinder. It's a little disappointing that drive modes, white balance options, ISO speeds and flash settings are available only through a Function button, but these remain as quick to access as similar settings on competing cameras.

The mode dial has the usual program, shutter-priority, aperture-priority and manual modes, plus some less common options. Sensitivity priority provides quick access to the ISO speed through a command dial, and shutter-and-aperture priority automatically adjusts the ISO speed based on manual shutter and aperture settings. You can also choose the minimum and maximum ISO speeds in Auto ISO mode, which come into play when the shutter speed reaches 1/30s. This gives optimal automatic exposures in pretty much any lighting conditions.

The combination of a fast, reliable auto-focus, no discernable shutter lag and a speedy processor resulted in the fastest performance we've ever seen: half a second between shots in normal use and a shot every second with the flash. As with the other 10-megapixel SLR cameras mentioned above, the continuous mode runs at 3fps, although unlike the Canon and Olympus models, it doesn't stop until the card is full.

Image quality tests revealed natural colours and superbly judged automatic exposures. White balance was excellent in outdoor and flash photography but needed help under tungsten lighting. However, the sophisticated white balance options made it easy to perfect the colour reproduction. Noise was insignificant at ISO 400, and although higher ISO settings produced slightly blotchy colours, the highest 1600 setting was still usable and didn't sacrifice detail. However, sharpness of images was below par. Increasing the Sharpness control in the menu improved matters to an extent, as did shooting in RAW mode and processing the image with the bundled software. We were able to eliminate the problem by processing RAW images in Abobe Lightroom. This indicates that the softness is a processing issue rather than an inherent lack of detail in photos. Regardless, the difference was imperceptible except at high magnification, so it's really only relevant when A4 or larger prints are required.