Pentax Optio LS465 review

Pentax is right to keep the price low, but it’s disappointing that there isn’t sufficient budget for optical stabilisation. Cheap cameras rarely perform well in low light, and the lack of stabilisation sets this one back even further. It also omits an orientation sensor, so portrait-shaped photos must be rotated manually. There’s no autofocus-assist lamp, either. It struggled to focus in low light as a result, but it also struggled at the long end of the zoom even in reasonably well lit conditions. This sometimes manifested itself in a delay of well over a second between pressing the shutter button and a shot being captured. At other times, the camera took an out-of-focus photo.

This shot is nicely exposed and looks sharp, but textures in the leaves and the swan’s feathers have been lost – click to enlarge

When the focus was accurate, image quality remained basic. 16 megapixels is an excessively high resolution for this sort of camera, and as usual, the result was high noise levels rather than sharp details. Photos taken in bright light looked a little blotchy in the shadows, and subtle textures often had a mushy quality. Details became heavily smeared in low light, but to its credit, the camera managed to produce photos that looked OK when resized to fit a computer screen.

Zooming in has resulted in soft focus, and noise is quite pronounced even in this relatively well-lit shot – click to enlarge

Videos are recorded at 720p, but the inefficient M-JPEG compression generates big files. The soundtrack was clear but even brightly lit clips fizzed with noise, and the zoom and autofocus were fixed for the duration of clips.

The camera has pushed up the ISO sensitivity to avoid blur in this shot, but colours are drab and subtle details have all but vanished – click to enlarge

This camera doesn’t make for a significant upgrade to a camera-phone. The 5x optical zoom is one feature that phones can’t match, but the unreliable focus when zoomed in and the lack of optical stabilisation limit its appeal. Unless the interchangeable designs are too tempting to resist, we’d recommend the Canon PowerShot A3200 IS instead.