Product Reviews

The Optio E40 is Pentax's most affordable camera, although you might not guess it from the 8-megapixel sensor and 2.4in screen. The plain design is more of a giveaway, though, and so too is the use of AA batteries. Disposable batteries are supplied in the box, but the camera managed 628 shots from a pair of 2,700mAh Ni-MH cells, which is a fantastic result.

This is the most affordable camera we've seen that includes face detection. It proved its worth by quickly finding faces and ignoring bright and dark backgrounds to achieve a balanced exposure on our subject's face. Other options are

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fairly typical of a point-and-shoot camera, but it's good to see manual focus and ISO speeds up to 1000. However, the 110,000-pixel resolution of the LCD screen makes it tricky to focus manually.

Performance is the E40's weakest area. It takes almost half a second from the time the shutter button is half-pressed before it even starts auto-focusing. This contributes to an overall focus time of between 1 and 2 seconds and an average of 4 seconds between photos. This is worse than its predecessor, the Pentax E30 (Labs, Shopper September 2007). Continuous mode has disappeared altogether.

Image quality was never poor but failed to compete with the best cameras at this price. Flesh tones tended to be a little pasty, and pictures displayed less detail and more noise than from most 8-megapixel cameras. Indoor shots without the flash were well exposed, but only sharp enough for viewing onscreen and not for printing out.

The E40 doesn't have any serious flaws, but its image quality and performance are below average, even at this price. It's disappointing that its higher resolution over the E30 seems to have damaged performance without providing any extra image detail.