Pentax Optio VS20 review

It’s not often that we see a camera with a groundbreaking design, but the VS20 is exactly that. It has two shutter buttons, each with a zoom lever encircling it. One is in the usual place on top of the camera, while the other is on the right edge when viewed from the back. It’s designed for more comfortable operation when shooting in portrait orientation. It’s a common feature on professional and semi-pro SLRs – often in the form of an optional battery-grip unit – but this is the first time we’ve seen it in a compact camera. Pentax has seen the concept through, with an additional tripod thread for portrait shooting. On-screen information is automatically reoriented, but menus always remain in landscape orientation.

Sadly, this camera isn’t the ergonomic triumph we’d hoped for. When shooting in landscape orientation, the area below the shutter button gives plenty to hold onto, and the various buttons fall under the thumb. However, when we switched to portrait orientation and the alternative shutter button, the natural tendency was to hold the camera in such a way that the lower part of our thumb obscured the screen. We could avoid this when holding the camera with two hands but it still wasn’t particularly comfortable and made the buttons hard to reach.

After a bad start, the VS20 continued by piling on the disappointments. The plastic body looks cheap, and at 39mm deep, it’s much chunkier than other big-zoom compacts such as the excellent Canon PowerShot SX230 HS. A promotional sticker was attached to the front of the model we tested, and removing it left an aggravating sticky residue.

The controls are basic, with most functions only accessible via the main menu. It’s an odd selection of photographic functions, with exposure bracketing but no manual exposure control or metering modes. It is possible to control the range of the Auto ISO mode, though, and there’s a customisable button that can be assigned to exposure compensation, ISO speed or resolution. Performance is pedestrian, taking 2.5 seconds to switch on and shoot, and over three seconds between shots. The screen was blank for most of these three seconds, so when the shot needed to be recomposed, we were further delayed. Flash photography shots were up to 10 seconds apart.

The camera failed to redeem itself in our image quality tests. Brightly lit shots were pleasantly exposed and full of colour, but close inspection revealed heavy noise reduction that glossed over fine details and gave photos a plastic-like quality. Noise reduction worked even harder in low light, and while it kept noise reasonably in check, only the boldest details had survived. Noise is a common problem among 16-megapixel 1/2.3in sensors, and this one follows the trend.

Image quality is at its best at wide-angle settings and in bright light, but noise reduction gives details a plastic-like quality

Telephoto shots had their own set of problems. Shots with focal lengths of 338mm and longer often suffered from misjudged autofocus, and at the full 560mm telephoto zoom position, out-of-focus shots were annoyingly frequent. Even when they were judged correctly, heavy chromatic aberrations compromised details towards the edges of the frame and produced distracting multi-coloured halos around high-contrast edges.

Telephoto shots suffer from poor focus – this is one of our better sample shots… 

…and this is one of the worst, but it’s not atypical

Videos were better, but the 720p resolution, inefficient Motion JPEG compression and inability to zoom while recording aren’t up to today’s standards. Stabilisation for videos is electronic rather than optical, and it failed to keep handheld telephoto clips steady.

Sadly, there’s not much to be positive about in the VS20. Its unusual controls are badly implemented, it’s slow, takes ugly photos and it isn’t much to look at either. It’s one to avoid. For this money you can currently pick up the excellent Canon PowerShot SX220 HS instead.