Indeed, as long as the A10 has the benefit of even and bright light, it will yield photos of landscapes and portraits, or macros, that will produce beautiful prints.

The Pentax Optio A10 is an eight megapixel digital camera with a three times optical zoom lens. It is small enough to fit into a pocket and has a simple, attractive design.

On the other hand it can be really, really annoying to use; by today’s standards shooting feels slow and unresponsive, and has a screen that can’t be seen at all in bright weather. Throw in the dismal battery life and total unsuitability as a social ‘party snaps’ camera and you’d think this was a camera you’d only recommend to someone with a masochistic streak, or someone you really didn’t like.

However, in a market where a lot of people don’t use cameras to their full potential, the default settings should be a bit more acceptable, so people can take good shots out of the box. The battery life was unimpressive as well.

Overall, the Optio A10 gets the job done. It might not have the coolest design or as many features as other point and shoots, but its photos are impressive–and that’s what matters.

The Pentax A10 was also one of the slowest compact models I’ve tried in recent months. In our speed tests, the Pentax A10 fared poorly overall with a slow start-up speed, noticeable shutter lag even when pre-focusing, and abysmal shot-to-shot speed even when the camera was in Continuous mode.

While the Pentax Optio A10 offers some appealing features (8-megapixels, Shake Reduction, etc.), the overall performance of this camera in all areas was disappointing. It does have the ability to capture pleasing photos that have enough resolution to create poster size prints. However, its poor movie mode results and extremely slow shooting performance really bring the model down.