Introduction

Product Tour

Overview

Pentax's first foray into the world of the ultra-zoom has followed the standard procedure of mimicking the look and feel of an SLR, though on a smaller scale, and weighing noticeably less.

Pentax's first ultra-zoom

Front

The grip is large enough to fill the hand quite readily, making it easy to hold. One problem is that the autofocus assist bulb is placed in a prime location for it to get covered with your fingers.

That AF assist bulb is easily blocked

Back

Users of Pentax SLRs will immediately feel at home with the button layout of the X70. It's a traditional four-way button set, with a control dial located handily by your thumb. The green button in the bottom right can be set to either bring you to a quick menu, or flip the camera into the 'green mode' that locks out virtually all user controls.

A familiar control scheme

Sides

The left side has the USB and DC ports, housed under a substantial rubber plug. You can also see the button to pop open the flash, and a series of holes that cover the speaker. Both the left and right sides have eyelets for attaching the camera strap.

The grip is nice and large

Top

The business end of the camera's controls are all tucked away on its top. You've got the mode dial, exposure compensation button, power, and the shutter control with a zoom ring surrounding it.

The zoom ring feels smooth and responsive

Bottom

Underneath the X70 is a tripod mount, and the door to the battery and memory card compartment. The tripod mount is camera-centered, though we would have preferred it to be lens-centered, because if you're using a tripod while zoomed in at the maximum 24x, having your center of rotation based around the lens makes framing slightly easier.

Shift the tripod mount about an inch to the left, and we'd be happy

Hardware

Viewfinder

As you'll find in most ultra-zooms, the Pentax X70 uses an electronic viewfinder, known as an EVF, which mirrors the controls and information that can be provided by LCD. The EVF provides 200,000-dot resolution. In our brief use the colors seemed quite washed out, but this was a pre-production sample.

The EVF was slightly underwhelming

LCD

The X70's LCD is a 2.7 inch, 230,000 dot display, with an anti-reflective coating to help against glare in the sun. Of course, being stuck in a conference center, we didn't get to see how well this worked in actual outdoor conditions.

We'll wait to get the screen into the sun to judge the claimed anti-reflective abilities.

Flash

The flash unit is located above the lens, and mechanically restrained most of the time. The advantage of having this sort of pop-up flash is that it's further from the lens, which reduces red-eye, and you probably won't ever block it with your fingers. The disadvantage to having it held down by a latch, rather than being raised and lowered electronically, is that the camera's automatic exposure system can't spring the flash itself in low light situations. 

The flash poised and ready for action

Lens

For an ultra-zoom of this magnitude, it's all about the lens. When fully extended, the X70's lens pokes out rather impressively, in order to get that full 24x zoom. The lens has a 35mm equivalent focal length of 26 to 624mm, which is a decent wide-angle spec. At the lens' widest setting the aperture runs from f/2.8 to f/8, and at maximum zoom, it's f/5 to f/8, which is pretty speedy.

Quite a snout on this beast

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

The Pentax uses what looks to be a standard USB port for computer connections and video out, as well as a DC in plug, if you want to invest in an optional AC power adapter..

USB and DC in

Battery

Many other manufacturers tuck four AA batteries into the grip of their ultra-zooms, but Pentax opted for a lithium ion rechargeable instead, which is rated at an exceedingly low 170 images. If this rating is correct, it would behoove users of this camera to keep a second battery on hand for days of heavy use.

Memory

As with most digital cameras at present, the X70 takes SD and SDHC cards, which are affordable and high capacity.

Design & Layout

Design & Appearance

The Pentax X70 looks very much like an SLR writ small. It has the same form factor, matte black plastic, large grip, and pop-up flash. It's hardly a design breakthrough, but it looks decent enough, and quite sophisticated.

Size & Handling

This camera fits well in the hand

While certainly smaller and lighter than most SLRs, the X70 still feels large and solid enough that it doesn't seem to be made of hollow plastic. The camera is 4.4 inches wide (112mm) by 3.2 inches heigh (81mm) by 3.9 inches deep (99mm), and weighs 14.5 oz (411g) with battery and memory card.

Menu

That's definitely pre-production firmware

The menu system is entirely based around the Menu button, unsurprisingly, through the Green button on the lower right of the back of the camera can be set up to access four user-defined options, so that you can shortcut around the menu for serttings that are frequently changed. The menu system is superimposed over the live view on the LCD or viewfinder, which lets you keep composing your shot while changing options, but can also look busy and confusing at times.

Ease of Use

The X70 is designed as a halfway point between point-and-shoots and SLRs, and so shares features with both. It has full manual controls, much like an SLR, yet has a simple auto mode and a large number of scene modes, like a point-and-shoot. This combination is particularly appealing if different family members with a range of photographic expertise will be using the camera.

Modes

Auto Mode

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The X70 uses a couple of different types of auto modes, depending on what you need, and your familiarity with the system. For those completely new to the camera, there's the Green mode which removes almost all controls. Then there's Auto Pict, which attempts to analyze what you're shooting to chose the best scene mode. Finally, program mode just sets the aperture and shutter speed, leaving the rest in your hands.

Movie Mode

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In movie mode, you can shoot 1280 x 720 at 15fps, or 848 x 480, 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 at 30fps.

Drive/Burst Mode

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There are three speeds of burst mode available, 11fps for 21 images, 6.3fps for 7 images, and 4fps for 7 images. We assume the faster speeds are at lower resolution, but we don't know for sure, since there was no documentation for our pre-production sample. There's also an auto bracketing mode, and interval shooting, which lets you take time-lapse photography.

Playback Mode

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In Playback Mode, you can view the images in calendar view, as nine thumbnails per page, or enlarged up to 10x. There are a large number of editing effects on offer too: you can add a frame to the image, resize, crop, rotate, remove red-eye, add a memo, capture a single frame from a video or divide movies into parts. There are also image filters. You can alter the image to black and white; sepia; tint to red, pink, purple, blue, green or yellow; isolate colors in red, green or blue; add a soft filter; fisheye; or tweak brightness.

 

Custom Image Presets

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For customization purposes, there's a User mode on the X70, which lets you save your settings for later use. There's also a wide array of scene modes for those who like such things. On the mode dial are Sport mode and Digital Shake Reduction, while the rest are found in scene mode: Landscape, Flower, Portrait, Backlight, Half Length Portrait (3M), Night Scene, Night Scene Portrait, Stage Lighting, Surf & Snow, Baby, Kids, Pet, Food, Fireworks, Frame Composite (3M), Party, Museum, Sunset, Digital Wide (5M), Digital Panorama (2M per frame).

Controls

Manual Controls

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The Pentax X70 has a full array of manual controls, a feature that's typical for this class of ultra-zoom

Focus

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The camera can be set to normal, macro, 1cm macro, manual focus, infinity and area select (where you chose a focal point from a 25 square grid). Even though there is a manual focus mode, there is, alas, no focus ring on the lens. Rather the up and down buttons of the four-way pad are used to control the focus.

ISO

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At full resolution, ISO runs from 64 to 1600, which can be bumped up to 3200 and 6400 at 5MP. If you use the auto ISO setting, this can be limited to any step between ISO 100 and ISO 1600.

White Balance

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The white balance system seems pretty standard, with presets for sun, shade, tungsten, fluorescentD, fluorescentN, fluorescentW and the ability to manually take a white balance reading.

Metering

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The usual suspects are here: multi, center-weighted and spot. Exposure compensation runs ±2EV in 1/3 steps.

Shutter Speed

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The shutter speed can be set from 1/4000 to 4 seconds. This is extremely fast at the one end, but we would have liked the long exposure setting to have run longer, perhaps to 10 or 15 seconds.

Aperture

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At full wide angle, the aperture runs from f/2.8 to f/8, at full telephoto zoom the maximum aperture shrinks to f/5, but the minimum stays the same.

Image Stabilization

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Pentax uses CCD stabilization in itscameras, where the sensor magnetically floats to a certain extent, which can absorb the vibrations of shaky hands, an absolutely critical feature for an ultra-zoom camera.

Picture Quality & Size Options

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The picture size maxes out at 12-megapixels, witht the smallest setting at 640 x 480, with image ratios of 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 1:1, available.

 

Picture Effects

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The only picture effect is the ability to set the image tone to bright, natural or monochrome.

Conclusion