Pentax Optio RZ18 review

The march of progress never ceases, but we still find it astonishing that this 16-megapixel camera with an 18x zoom and 3in screen costs just over £100. We wondered how Pentax had brought it in at such a low price, but close inspection reveals quite a few reasons.

The plastic body looks pretty basic, but it isn’t ugly. There’s no HDMI output, though, and the plastic buttons feel cheap. The lack of any dials for changing modes or adjusting settings doesn’t come as a surprise, but we’d have liked a dedicated video record button. Instead, there’s a button for face detection and a smile shutter, which captures a photo about a second after your subject displays a toothy grimace; not the most deserving features for a dedicated button.

The Optio RZ18 uses a basic plastic body, but it isn’t ugly.

Then again, this video mode is unlikely to see a lot of use. It captures at 720p in the inefficient Motion JPEG format, which gobbles up 180MB of card space per minute and limits clip lengths to just over 10 minutes.

Zoom and focus are fixed for the duration of clips, but at least that means there’s no chance of lens motors interfering with the soundtrack, which was full-bodied and clear. Sadly, its video picture quality elicits few positive comments. Details were poor even compared to other 720p cameras, and well-lit outdoor shots suffered from fizzy noise and vertical purple streaks. Handheld shots at the full zoom extension were particularly unpleasant, with the optical stabilisation transforming gentle shakes into a series of sharp jolts.

It isn’t particularly fast either, taking 2.4 seconds on average between shots. The 0.8fps continuous mode is pretty hopeless, but dropping the resolution to five megapixels let us shoot at up to 9.2fps for an impressive 40 frames, which is just the thing for capturing fast-paced action.

Our image quality tests revealed ups and downs, too. The lens performed admirably, the only notable weakness being slightly soft focus in the corners of frames at telephoto settings.

The 18x lens belies the low price, and focus is extremely impressive.

The autofocus was sometimes incorrect, but it was easy to spot this on the 3in, 460,000-dot screen and have another go at the shot. The 16-megapixel CCD helped deliver lots of detail, but even in bright light there was a fair amount of noise. Still, we appreciate how the camera let a little noise through in bright conditions rather than smearing it to oblivion.

The same couldn’t be said of indoor shots, though. These were blotchy, streaky and smeared, and looked pretty unpleasant, even after resizing them to fit the screen. Settings were well chosen to strike a balance between the twin threats of noise and blur, but ultimately, this camera isn’t much better than a camera-phone for indoor photography.

Low-light shooting is marred by blotchy, streaky and smeared results.

It isn’t fair to compare this £100 camera with models costing two or three times as much, but at this price most people will be better off going for a camera with more modest specifications and better image quality, such as the Canon Ixus 115 HS. If you need a big zoom, perhaps to photograph wildlife, and don’t care about indoor photography or video, then the RZ18 is a decent budget option.