Pentax Q10

The Pentax Q10 is the company's second attempt at making a petite camera with interchangeable lenses. Its first, the Q, had a lot of charm, but suffered from some performance issues and was a tough sell when it was introduced at $799.95.

The Q10 is physically identical to its predecessor—although it ships with a different bundled lens—and is offered at a lower price point. It's a cute camera, and performs slightly better than the Q.

The Q10 measures 2.3 by 4 by 1.3 inches (HWD), making it the smallest interchangeable lens camera on the market. It's light at 6.4 ounces, and while the body is mostly plastic (the Q had a sturdy magnesium body), the camera feels quite solid.

The 3x zoom lens covers a 27-83mm equivalent field of view and is a little large for the camera—it's narrower in diameter than the 14-42mm (28-84mm equivalent) lens that Olympus bundles with the PEN Mini, but matches its height.

I used Imatest to check the image quality produced by the included kit lens and the Q10's image sensor. At its widest setting the lens is sharp, notching 2,019 lines per picture height via a center-weighted metric—we use 1,800 lines to define a sharp photo, but sharpness drops as you zoom in.

The rear display is 3 inches in size and features a 460k-dot resolution. It's reasonably sharp, but others cameras in this class have moved to sharper 920k-dot LCDs.

We shot our standard test scene using the Q10 and its 5-15mm lens.

This 100 percent crop shows you the level of detail you can expect from the Q10 and its kit lens at 5mm f/2.8.

This sample image and the others in the slideshow were shot using the Q10 and its kit lens.

In terms of noise, which can rob photos of sharpness and make them look grainy at higher ISO settings, the Q10 keeps it below our 1.5 percent threshold through ISO 1600—and the figure only increases to 1.6 percent at ISO 3200.

The Q is a slow camera. It requires 3.5 seconds to start and shoot and is a bit slow to lock on focus and fire a shot, requiring 0.3-second to do so. It can capture a burst of 6 JPG shots in a just over a second, but requires about 2.9 seconds to write those photos a memory card.

The Pentax Q10 is a very cute camera, but sadly its performance issues make it a tough recommendation. The included zoom lens isn't as sharp or compact as the prime lens that was included with the previous-generation Q.