Pentax's Optio M50 offers a slew of interesting features, but are its pictures any good?
Review summary of the Pentax Optio M50:
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 Pentax has given their Optio M50 a few nifty abilities, but the image-quality isn't as spectacular, and the camera is hampered by consistently shallow depth-of-field. Gadget-lovers may love the M50's innovative features, but those who just want to take pictures could easily find a more dependable camera. Release: March 2008. Price: $230.
Pros: Interesting features, user-configurable button, broad ISO range.
Cons: Tends towards overexposure, narrow f-stop range.
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Full Pentax Optio M50 Review:
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Design - Good
The Pentax Optio M50 is a solid if unremarkably built camera. Instead of a catching style or notable flourishes, Pentax has instead opted for a familiar layout alloyed to a classy body, and if the M50 doesn't win any points for originality, neither does it lose any for ill-conceived decisions. The camera moreover handles nicely and feels well-made, despite being almost intangibly lightweight.
The back houses the 2.5-inch viewfinder and a standard array of buttons, including a four-way controller, menu and playback buttons, and a face-recognition toggle. Zoom is controllable via a typical two-way controller, and the shutter release and power switch are expectedly on the top.
The best inclusion in Pentax's design, and something approaching genius, is what they've labeled the "green button." Essentially any and all user-settings are assignable, so even if you demand rapid adjustments to sharpness, the green button can handle it. For instance, we love having immediate access to ISO selections, which the button handily accommodated.
Features - Good
The M50 packs a collection of expected features, including face-recognition with automated smile-shutter, pan / infinity / macro focus ranges, red-eye correction, and a decent voice-recorder. It also sports a phenomenally wide ISO-range, all the way from 64 – 6400, and standard white-balance and exposure-compensation controls. In our tests, the smile-shutter was quick and accurate, and ISO-6400 was, appropriately, almost blindingly sensitive.
Less expected is a frame function that outfits photos with stylized borders. It's amusingly tawdry at best. Better is the inclusion of a fully-featured calendar which allows photos and sound-recordings to be associated with dates; this is doubly useful as both an organizational tool to keep track of when photos were taken, and to set reminders with visual and/or audio cues.
Pentax has also included a mysterious "digital shake-reduction" feature that purportedly works in two-stages. First, it seemed to ratchet up ISO-sensitivities and suppress the flash all the way down to a 1/30-second shutter. Both behaviors are typical of other ‘low-light' settings on compact cameras. However, Pentax further touts the ability to reduce perceived shake even after the image has been recorded. There is very little technical information available on this, so we can only presume that it performs some sort of intelligent post-processing, possibly a combination of sharpening and blur-reduction. Unfortunately, no matter how often we tried to use this feature, the camera returned the cryptic error "cannot process correctly," so the jury remains out.
All is forgiven, though, because Pentax also has developed some of the coolest new point-and-shoot features we've seen in a long while. First is the "intelligent digital-zoom" feature; typically the words ‘digital zoom' cause even the most nonchalant of photographers to blanch in disgust, but Pentax has reinvigorated the feature to usefulness. Essentially, whenever a user is shooting at resolutions below eight megapixels, the M50 can repurpose the imaging-sensor to zoom losslessly into a section of the picture. At 640x480, the feature can provide a non-destructive equivalent up to an impressive 25.5x zoom. Granted, this is fundamentally the equivalent of taking a full-resolution photo and cropping it in post, but it's nevertheless nice to have this ability in-camera while shooting.
We also liked the built-in panorama mode, but successfully lining up all three images was no easily accomplished feat, as seen in the image-quality section. Also, one drawback to performing everything in-camera is that, instead of resulting in three full-size photos side-by-side (i.e., a 9792x2448 image), the M50 instead delivers a file downsized to 4128x1064.
Similar to the panorama feature but possibly even cooler is Pentax's ‘digital wide mode.' This also provides visual-aids to align several photos, but in this case the user holds the camera vertically and only two images are used. This results in an image with a focal depth similar to one from a 28mm wide-angle lens. Unfortunately, the resulting file is also downsized (to 2592x1944). Also, we are starting to see some compacts with true wide-angle lenses, so Pentax's ingenuity here may already be obsolete. Still, this is a nifty addition to the camera's feature-set, and, no matter how tricky the process may be, an option to shoot at wide-angles is nevertheless preferable to no option at all.
Interface / Bundle - Good
The Optio M50 has an easily accessible system of menus, the expected range of shortcuts and toggles, and the aforementioned green button, which practically doubles the camera's ease-of-use. Pentax allows you to select modes via a grid of icons, themselves large and colorful.
Our only complaint concerns accessing the digital-wide mode, which is done by zooming all the way out and then pressing the ‘zoom out' button once more. This was a bit too easy to access accidentally, as we tend to press the zoom-out button often to make sure the lens is at its lowest focal-length. In any event, we felt the digital-wide feature would be best served as a separately selectable mode.
Pentax's included software is functional. The bundle includes a ‘device detector' that basically replaces the built-in device manager on Windows, a slideshow utility that churns through one's photo collection, and a library with minimal editing capabilities. Pentax also offers an online-repository service entitled ‘SendPix,' to which their library software can directly upload, and the M50 itself supports PictBridge for printing straight from the camera to a supported printer.
Image quality - Good
First and foremost, the Optio M50 has excellent noise-management. In this department the camera rivals even the Nikon point-and-shoots we've seen, and coupled with its tremendous ISO range, this makes the M50 a great choice for low-light shooting. In fact, it's the first compact we've seen in which even ISO-1600 is relatively clean. Contrarily, ISO-6400 is a mess, but its mere availability at this price-range is impressive.
The drawback to the M50 is its undependable automation. In many of our tests, the camera's chosen shutter-speeds were a bit too slow, which, together with the lens's narrow range of f-stops (up to only 5.6), yielded overexposed images. This is exacerbated by the camera's complete lack of manual overrides. It really is an unfortunate Achilles' heel for the M50, as its image quality is otherwise quite good.
Scene test
In this scene sample, very little noise is evident in the sky, and all around edge-delineation and color reproduction are spot-on. Unfortunately, the M50 elected for a 1/250 second shutter, which led to an image at least a half-stop overexposed. Considering the camera's shutter can go all the way down to 1/2000 seconds, we were confused as to why the camera's AE program settled on a 1/250 shutter with an ISO of 64, while it was pointed at a bright midday sky.
Edge test
The M50's image-sensor also shines in this fringing test, in that there are no halos or purple fringes, and the background is essentially noise-free. However, the limitations of the aperture again come into play, as the 5.6 f-stop renders a shallow focus on spots that preferably would have been in deep focus. The white-balance is also a bit off, resulting in a sky with a tad too much yellow.
Macro test
The camera performed best in our macro-test. Macro focusing-ranges require wide apertures, which the M50 handily can deliver, and again the image-sensor does a good job of pulling out detail without any over-sharpening. Noise is also essentially absent.
Digital-wide test
For this sample we tested the M50's digital-wide mode and found it an acceptable approximation of wide-angle photography. It's a bit of a pain to use, as one has to precisely line the images up, and even then, some signs of stitching are still evident (here most noticeably in the distorted gradient in the sky). Still, as mentioned before, it's a cool feature that adds to instead of detracts from the camera's usefulness.
Panorama test
Finally we tested the M50's built-in panorama mode and found it similarly cool, if tricky to execute, as evinced by the visible misalignments between the three images. In our defense, Pentax makes no mention of requiring a tripod for the feature to work as advertised, and, given the size of the viewfinder, on a sunny day it's just shy of impossible to get everything properly aligned. Still, a cool feature, though, like the ‘digital wide' mode, its impact is lessened by the low-res images it delivers.
Price and availability
The Pentax Optio M50 is available now for $230.
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