Pentax Optio H90 review

Retro-fashion compact packing a beefy 12MP

The must-have colour this season is apparently orange, which either makes the boffins at Pentax terribly fashion-conscious or remarkably prescient. The Optio H90 comes in silver with a splash of metallic orange. Other colours are available, but we think this is the nicest. The actual shape of the thing is early-Noughties, retro Canon IXUS, but with the svelte dimensions of a current compact. It’s light too, easily slipping into a pocket with little danger of straining the lining. In terms of features there’s the usual checklist: unfeasibly large 12MP resolution, 28mm wide-angle lens, face recognition and so on. There’s not a lot to shout about here that you haven’t heard or seen before.

The resolution is a whopping 12MP, packed into a 1/2.3” CCD sensor and offering a resolution of 4000 x 3000. This is very much a point-and-shoot camera, with Program mode and a host of scene modes. It does mean that there’s +/- 2EV exposure compensation, a choice of three metering functions (though there’s little difference between zone and centre-weighted) and an impressive ISO range that runs from ISO 80 up to ISO 6400. On the front the Pentax lens runs from the 35mm equivalent of 28mm up to 140mm – a 5x optical range from the wide-angle end. Of course 140mm is only four times a 35mm standard view, so the reach isn’t particularly long. Enter then the digital zoom, which blows the middle up and fills in the holes. By the time you’ve added the 6x digital zoom onto the optical, the result is more like an artist’s impression than a photograph.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Macro mode. Regular macro is an abject 10cm, while ‘super’ macro is an equally unimpressive 8cm. There are other performance issues as well; the burst rate at full resolution only clocks a wheezing five shots in ten seconds, and in the Sports mode it’s largely impossible to focus on anything that’s fast moving. To be fair, most compacts aren’t very good at sports-type photography, but this is just worse, with no mechanical optical stabilisation.

Most of the innovative features are actually courtesy of the firmware. There’s shake reduction on slow shutter speed shots, but it really isn’t that effective. Face recognition complete with blink and smile detection works, until the face turns 45 degrees and it loses the tracking. The smile recognition also picks up anything crescent-shaped. Dynamic highlight is another option that works to a degree; it gives a bit more detail where an ordinary shot might lose it, but the payoff is a jump in the ISO to 160.

In terms of handling it’s okay, but the LCD screen really struggles in bright light so that as soon as it’s moved at an angle, it becomes unviewable. A lack of buttons means plenty of visits to the menus, which are thankfully easy to navigate. A solitary green button can be assigned a function of your choice: exposure compensation or ISO rating are the best bets.

The lack of performance would be more palatable if the image quality was top-notch, but it’s almost a step back to a previous generation of camera. Landscape mode shoves so much saturation into blues and greens that the images look a little sick, there’s noise thanks to the high resolution in a small space conundrum and the digital zoom and high ISO modes create Rolf Harris-style pictures. Once past the colour, styling and low price, you have a very average compact indeed.