We might not know much about engineering, but we've seen
enough episodes of Scrapheap Challenge to know that it's always the
steam-powered cars and home-made hovercraft with hinges that collapse
before the chequered flag.
So we approached the new Pentax tape-free
camcorder with kid gloves. Not only does it have a rotating grip, a
folding screen and a pop-up flash, but it also looks like a product of
the scrapheap itself: bits of a camcorder here, a fragment of digital
camera there, and maybe even part of a Star Trek tricorder.
The best way to hold the hybrid MX4 is in a pistol grip, with the
zoom and shutter under your right index finger and the movie button
under your thumb. If you don't fold the LCD screen down, it obscures
the menu pad and mode dial. There's no optical alternative to the
1.8-inch display, so it's lucky that it's clear and colourful even in
bright sunshine. However, it's a tad slow to respond to changing light
conditions.
There's plenty of room in the MX4's horizontal
plastic case for a big 10x lens. The optics are quiet, but not
especially fast or smooth when zooming, lending movies a hesitant,
amateur look. Although clips are recorded in memory-efficient MPEG-4
files, you'll only fit about a minute of full-quality footage on the
32MB Secure Digital card supplied, so we'd recommend you splash out
another £75 on a 1GB card to make serious use of the video features.
The VGA movies are very smooth (thanks to a fast, 30fps frame rate) and
have good exposure but slightly grainy colours. Mono sound is muffled
indoors and ruined by even the slightest puff of wind outside. There's
also no video light or night mode for low-light shooting.
On the
camera side, there are plenty of aperture, shutter and exposure
settings for keen photographers to fiddle with. More importantly, the
four-megapixel still images are natural and colourful, especially when
you bring the powerful flash into play.
However, the model does
struggle when trying to focus in low-light conditions, and can suffer
at times from ugly fringing effects and a lack of fine detail. Shutter
delay, processing time and continuous shooting (a miserable two frames
in one second) are all surprisingly slow for a convergence product.
There's
no doubting that Pentax deserves credit for managing to pull together a
four-megapixel camera-corder at such a competitive price, but like most
Scrapheap Challenges, the MX4 is more about entertainment than
real-life practicality.
