Pentax Optio LS465 review

Just in case there was any doubt as to who the LS465 is aimed at, Pentax’s website shows it next to a stick of pink lipstick. It’s available in a choice of black, purple or pink finishes and comes with 10 front panel designs. These acrylic inserts fit under a clear plastic cover, and include polka dots, Dalmatian print, a leather effect and a relatively dull address label. Thirty-something IT journalists aren’t best placed to second guess the tastes of teens and tweens, but for what it’s worth we think Pentax has done a fine job with the design, even if it makes no secret about the low price.

The rounded ends and low height make it easy to slip into jeans pockets. This also limits the screen size, which is a 2.7in widescreen affair. That’s great for the 720p video mode, but it means that photos appear just 2.2in across on the screen. The small design also limits the battery size and life – 200 shots isn’t much.

Children and teenagers aren’t likely to be interested in manual settings but the LS465 offers surprising amount of control, with ISO speed, white balance, exposure compensation, focus area, contrast, sharpness and saturation controls. They only appear when Program mode is selected, though. Auto Picture mode limits control to ISO speed and little else.

There’s a wide selection of scene presets, such as landscape, flower, food and kids, and short on-screen descriptions explain when to use them and what the effect will be. The Natural Skin Tone scene preset worryingly promises to “Enhance skin tones while smoothing blemishes”. This sends a terrible message to children, so we were relieved to find that it had no discernible effect whatsoever. The Miniature Filter preset is more wholesome and effective, blurring the top and bottom of the frame to give photos the appearance of macro photography.

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

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

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

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.