Customer Reviews

Pentax Optio P80 12.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Optical Zoom with Shake Reduction and 2.7-inch LCD (White)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

So I will start off by saying that cost was of major concern when I was shopping for my camera, and the price, honestly, is pretty good. But I'm here to tell you what you are and aren't getting for that money.


Value-
I admit, I was purely going by review ratings (kind of), capabilities, name brand and price when I was shopping. But the price was pretty good for what it is, and the video features of this camera were better than others that were in the price range. The positives are the included USB cable but on the other hand, since it takes AAs, no rechargable batteries were included, instead just two alkalines were packed. You'll have to get your own memory card too, but in this day and age, they're realtively cheap anyways.


Appearance-
The slick black design is really nice and the contrasting chrome lens framing is good balance. It is by far more attractive than my old Nikon 5200. The big screen is also really nice, and the buttons are simple, minimalistic and quite just how I like them.


Construction and Quality-
The camera is solid and balanced and the buttons have a nice feel to them. However, while excused by the low price, I have my doubts about the plastic housing and its durability. Will the glossy black shell lose its luster and color?

Also of concern is the trap door for the batteries and memory card. My old Nikon had a nice sturdy metallic housing, but its ultimate failing was the battery trap door that didn't sit flush after one of the tabs broke. The same design was used for this new Optio, and it worries me a bit more, since the Nikon had a latch holding back the battery while the trap door on this Optio has to do the work of holding back the two AA batteries.

Made in China. This was a negative for me, but discussing my reasons would be off topic. Decide for yourself. If I would have known and was made aware of competing products that weren't made in China, I would have probably gone with something else.


Practicality-
It fits in my pockets just fine, no protruding parts, so it slides in and out of jean pockets just fine. The use of AAs is a great concept, since you don't have to buy model specific batteries, instead just alkalines or AA rechargables. Great for a couple years down the line, if you want to keep the camera and the rechargables are shot. Cheaper and easier to find!

The filing system is quite handy, and instead of just one folder of all the pictures you've ever taken, it creates a new folder for every day and sorts the pictures by date. In playback mode, simply press the zoomout button 3 times, and it will show you a calendar with all the days that you took pictures. You can also disable this feature if you want to.

There is also an easy mode that turns off all the advanced information and just tells you the amount of pictures you still have room for, and the battery life, with larger text. This is useful if you don't want all the complexities or have a hard time seeing all the small text.


Performance-
The camera would be just fine for someone who wants a camera that will take decent looking pictures, nothing more. The focus, the colors, and the sharpness are all fine most of the time. But if you want manual settings, like to get close ups or have other performance requirements, that is where the camera falls short. I'm not talking about megapixels, so if thats the only thing you understand or want to hear about, skip this section.

Autofocus: The focus works great on subjects that are far away to an armslength away. But if you enjoy getting close to flowers or small, detailed things, you'll find yourself having to tell the camera to refocus a few times before you get a sharp image. My old Nikon was better in that respect, and I got really nice images of coins, flowers, and patterns, something that I'`m having more trouble doing. I find myself having to keep the camera a bit further away from the subject, even with macro. But of course, with twice the resolution, I can crop off the extra background and still have a high definition image.

Autofocus (cont.): In my old Nikon, you had the capability of defining which area of the picture you wanted autofocus to focus on, something lacking here. I miss that feature alot, but its not a complete deal breaker.

White balance: The WB is not user definable or atleast I haven't figured out how to force a WB setting. The auto WB works most of the time, but there have been times where the WB was completely off and it was refusing to make white look white. Unacceptable if you want that control over the consistency of color in camera.

Video: The video works fine, but the audio quality is not quite what I'd like it to be. But then again, I do alot of video work and probably have higher expectations than most and I usually just use this camera for still images and not so much video. But the quality is acceptable and presentable. No real zoom during recording.


Summary and concluding remarks-
This camera looks good, is built well and all at a great price point. The camera lacks a metal casing, but otherwise feels fine, but the battery trapdoor is of some concern. For normal, pedestrian uses, the picture quality is fine, but the camera lacks user-definable settings for more sophisticated and/or demanding users. The video quality is ok and will do just fine for a family video or your vlogs. It takes widely availabe and cheap AA batteries and SD memory cards, so no worries there.

Is this camera full of features and advanced capabilities? No.
Does it take good pictures/videos? Yes.
Are there better cameras? Yes.
Its it worth the price? At the Amazon discounted price w/ free shipping, yes.

Pentax's P80 is a joy to own and use.

I've tested it thoroughly for 2 weeks. Its photos are technically pleasing 95% of the time. I never knew a camera could be this nice.

I love how the self timer works. It stays in effect until turned off, so I can do a long session of tripod mounted macros without having to use buttons and menus. There's even an option to have it remember the self timer setting when the camera is turned off and on. This will save huge amounts of time for night photography.

The interface was very easy to figure out. I was operating it with ease right away.

Video quality is excellent. 30 fps 1280x720 clips look incredible on an HDTV. The camera allows white balance and EV adjustments in video mode. The live histogram is accurate and useful to help capture the ideal image. Audio sounds clean and great too. The self timer function is available in video mode, so camera shake at the beginning of clips can be eliminated. Unlike QuickTime, the camera's AVI file format easily imports into Windows Movie Maker and Virtual Dub.

I use D-Range to control shadows and highlights. It works! I took a picture of new, bright white sneakers with black accents in noon sunlight and it turned out perfectly, even with contrast set to high. That kind of subject has far too much dynamic range for other cameras I've used.

I wish it had a black and white mode so I could simply get BW photos directly. There's an in-camera conversion option, but in the opinion of this reviewer it's a waste of battery life and storage space. Picasa does very good BW conversions of P80 photos. Other cameras have problems with challenging BW subjects like white and chrome cars on sunny days, but Pentax has it figured out. I'm always amazed to see wide, perfectly contained histograms in test photos I was sure would be failures. It's hard to make it clip shadows and highlights.

I didn't expect such useful results from a small, high resolution sensor. To my delight, the sensor delivers 12 good megapixels. Detail is excellent. The camera doesn't aggressively reduce noise and smear colors together.

It does lens correction. 28mm shots with strong barrel distortion are beautifully converted to scenes with straight lines and edges. It happens fast too.

I'm a very negative, fault finding person. It says a lot that this product exceeds my modest expectations.

After experimenting with its huge amounts of adjustment settings, I will use it in Auto ISO, high contrast, high sharpness, medium saturation, daylight white balance, D-Range shadows and highlights, and 7 megapixels. EV adjustments are rarely necessary thanks to D-Range processing. Leaving it at -0.3 appears to work well most of the time.

If I'm in a photographically ideal situation, I'll turn off D-Range and go to ISO 64 at 12 megapixels. (The lower limit with D-Range on is ISO 125.)

The tripod mount is centered, so the camera won't easily tip over with mini-tripods. I use a mini-tripod as a camera grip for more stability. It compensates for the P80's small size and light weight.

The camera has some purple fringing issues, so I can't give it 5 stars. They're easy to take care of in editing. I bought the thing mainly for black and white, so purple fringing doesn't matter much to me.

I tried its highest saturation setting and would not recommend it for normal, colorful scenery. None of the color channels blew out, but maximized blue skies and sunlit green plants looked too weird for my taste. High saturation would work better with drab subjects to bring out more color than the eye sees.

Overall, I find this a pretty good little digital point and shoot, and a good replacement for our earlier model of Pentax Optio. For indoor shooting, I am impressed at the depth achieved by the flash -- much better than our earlier model. In fact, I really wasn't expecting such good results. If I were to fault the camera at all, I would say that the colors in the photos are vibrant -- perhaps a bit more vibrant than in actuality. Still, that is a minor problem -- if a problem at all -- for a digital camera in such a portable package.

I have used this camera for a couple of weeks and have found it to be a great buy. I wanted a very compact camera to carry basically anywhere and this fit the bill. It has a wide range of options that I am still trying to master. One negative I have found so far, and it may be user error, is the pictures blur very easily as the magnification is increased.

I bought this because I had given my 8mp SE phone to my mom (along with my Sony camera). I realized that my Sony was bulky to carry around and did not prove as effective as when I was a student (took it to games and stuff). So, this is my continuing saga where I research on really good brands that most of my 'desi' friends aren't even aware of. They say "Pentax??!! What the heck is that? Why didn't you buy a Canon or a Sony?" The picture quality, face recognition and the speed are very nice. This is basically what you'd NEED but may not WANT. There are a lot of built-in profiles that are very easy to set the camera to in an instant. The interface is okay but I think I personally might want some more (I see everything as computers ...)
Anyway, awesome buy. And, I did have a 20 bucks manufacturer's discount.

I am a novice, and I use it for family pictures and videos. It does the job perfectly! The Pentax brand stands up well to the beating delivered by a family with several toddlers and young children. I like all of the settings, helping me to be a better photographer than I actually am. My only difficulty with the camera is that one of the settings delivers two flashes, so my family would forget and moves as soon as the first flash occured. With several reminders, though, my family has gotten used to it, so now our pictures turn out beautifully! Plus, if I just use a different setting, it's not a problem! One thing I really like: my old Pentax wouldn't take pictures of my son playing b-ball in a gym very well. This model does a great job of taking indoor photos of moving objects with the proper amount of flash!

I decided to buy this digital camera because of following three points: First, it's cheap; second, it can take full HD (1080p) picture; it's movie-taking (Half HD; 740p) ready. I'm just an amateur "photo-taker (I'm saying that I'd prefer to say "photo-taker" rather than photographer)," who just needs to take some pictures and movies for own blog posts or memories.

The taken pictures are almost too good for me; that's perfect although I haven't taken any picture outside at night. Full HD pics are pretty much better than the qualities of pictures that I took with my previous camera, Pentax Optio S30, which offers 3.2Megapixels.

For movie-taking, I think it's perfect for those amateurs who don't know much about how-to-take perfect movies; it just perfectly functions to take movies for life-logs. Although the resolution is 740p, Half HD, I don't expect that my movies are perfectly acceptable to watch with a full screen on 54 inch TV or something. (I just want to keep those movies for my memories; then, 740p is almost too good for movie-taking.)

It's also lightweight, much lighter than my previous camera, Optio S30. So, I always take it with Eneloop, rechargeable batteries from SANYO. I can totally recommend this camera for those who are looking for the one with a affordable price tag to take photos and movies for memories and personal blogs.

We have owned (and still own) two other Pentax compact cameras: an Optio 60 and an Optio P60. We have fallen in love with the simplicity of the menus, the quality of the photos, and the incredible battery life of the E80. This camera is so intelligent and quick that it is simply amazing. Even low light pictures, macros, and photos of fast objects come out looking spectacular. This camera offers performance which you would have paid $300+ for only a year or two ago. The small size means it fits in shirt pockets or pants pockets easily. We don't even keep track of battery life because basic rechargeable AA batteries last a very long time in this camera. We are so thrilled with the Optio E80 and we can see this coming along on every vacation, to every party, and to every special event where a bulky camera is not needed.

I have owned this camera for a year, and I have never been disappointed. The picture quality is amazing; I get comments all the time on how clear and high quality my photos are. I have taken pictures with this camera in Utah, Washington, Nevada, DC, Virginia, New York, Alabama, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic... waterfalls, deserts, people, animals, snow, sun, beach, forest, ocean, overcast, indoor... you name it, I've tried it. And almost always I am pleased with the outcome. I have owned 8 compact digital cameras as well as 2 digital SLRs, and this is by far my favorite. It's so sleek and small, I take it everywhere and use it daily. I've dropped it a few times and it doesn't have a scratch. The color is classic and even a bit glamorous. The picture modes are maybe a little overkill, but they're also fun to use in different situations. My father (photographer) and sister (not a photographer) now own this as well, and are just as pleased with the ease and quality. I HIGHLY suggest buying this camera!!!

I have been using a Pentax camera, mostly on vacations, for several year and am pleased with it. I wanted a camera with a wide angle lense so I could take group pictures and landscapes without leaving out part of the scene I wanted.

After I received the Pentax P80 and started taking test pictures to see how it works, I found that the advertising about "wide angle" lense was misleading. What the camera does is stitch two or three pictures together to make one wide picture. That is hardly a wide angle lense. I already had a Canon camera that allows me to take two pictures and then stitch them together with the software Cannon provided. The Canon is a much larger camera and it is still difficult to take two pictures that can match each other enough to stitch them together. The Pentax is very small (which I like) but it is almost impossible to take two or three pictures that match enough to stitch together.

I should have known better to think I could get a wide angle lense on a camera that only cost $130. But the darn thing is so easy to carry around, and takes such good pictures, that I won't leave home without it (and my cell phone, of course).