Early first impressions and some sample images from the new Pentax Q

Yesterday evening I was able to briefly have a play with the new Pentax Q ultra-compact Compact System Camera. The event was hosted by UK photo goods and services retailer, Jessops, at its New Oxford Street store in London. Jessops will selling the Q range exclusively in the UK until the end of October.

The Pentax UK staff present had only received their demonstration stock of Q cameras earlier this week. I was able to borrow one for a few minutes and wander around inside and outside the store taking pictures and there is a gallery of sample images below, some with accompanying DNG-format RAW files (so most RAW processors should be able to deal with them).

I've requested a sample for a more in-depth evaluation but my short time with the camera did reveal some interesting points. The Q really is small and light thanks to the use of its 12 megapixel 1/2.3 inch sensor and the lack of a focal plane shutter. The sensor, which I understand is made by Sony, is a back-lit CMOS device, and similar sensors are found in a selection of reasonably high-end compact and bridge-type digital cameras.

The Pentax Q is noticeably smaller than the already-small Olympus Pen Lite E-PL3, for example.

This is a very tiny sensor indeed - you could fit thirty of them over a full frame sensor with space to spare, or 11 over a Canon APS-C sensor. The smallest CSC sensor until now was the Four Thirds sensor in Olympus Pen and Panasonic Lumix G Micro Four Thirds cameras and that's still almost 8x the area of the 1/2.3 inch sensor in the Q. The cropping factor compared to full frame is about 5.6x, so the 8.5mm f/1.9 standard lens I tried delivers a field of view equivalent to a 47mm full frame lens, near enough as makes no difference to the classic 50mm standard lens.

Pentax chose a 1/2.3 inch sensor size for the Q - that's the orange area in the diagram above.

At least there is a decent sized 3 inch LCD on the back of the camera, and a hot shoe on the top. Two good-sized knobs are designed into the right hand corner of the top plate as viewed by the photographer. As there is no focal plane shutter, normally the Q depends on a leaf shutter built into the lens. This does limit the fastest shutter speed on the 8.5mm lens I used to 1/2000th sec, which could be a problem on bright days if you want to use a wide aperture. There are also 'Toy' lenses for the Q that are designed to limit optical corrections with the intention of producing images with the character of a toy camera. This may have been inspired by LensBaby style accessory lenses for SLRs that have proved popular in recent years. Toy lenses have no shutter, so when these are used the camera depends on the sensor itself to act as the shutter, electronically. The sensor is, by the way, electro-mechanically stabilised.

My first impression of the few pictures I took is quite good. I was expecting sharp, but grainy results, possibly lacking textural detail. To my eye the images do look like those from a good quality compact camera, but they certainly rate as very high quality for this category. The give-away that this is a very small sensor camera is that even at f/1.9 there is very little background blur. Pentax has anticipated this and I tried out a feature of the Q to artificially introduce additional blur and so to enhance 'bokeh'. There are some examples in the sample images below. I wasn't very impressed by this feature - it's rather hit and miss. I was also rather surprised to find that several images that should have seen the ISO setting change upwards to the maximum of ISO 6400 had not changed in ISO value. I'm not sure if this was the fault of the sample camera or if, for some unknown reason, my operation of the ISO adjustment wasn't correct. That's another thing to check when we get a production camera to review. Another niggle is that I found no way to set the camera to record RAW and JPEG at the same time, which is my preference. Instead, apparently need to press a button after each shot in order to select RAW recording of the image just taken. But full marks to Pentax for supporting the Adobe DNG universal RAW format, so there will be no waiting around for a proprietary format to be supported.

Anyway, here are some sample images to have a look at.

As usual, please be aware that some of these files are very large - between 2MB and 22MB each.

We always look forward to your feedback - either email us at feedback@dpnow.com, or via our discussion forum.

Image 1: Bokeh control off Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 320 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 2: Bokeh control on Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 320 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 3: Shutter Speed: 1/30 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 400 Focal Length: 8.5 mm
Image 4: Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 800 Focal Length: 8.5 mm Link to RAW file	Image 5: Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec Aperture: f 4 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 6: Bokeh control off Shutter Speed: 1/400 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm
Image 7: Bokeh control maximum Shutter Speed: 1/640 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 8: Bokeh control minimum Shutter Speed: 1/640 sec Aperture: f 1.9 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 9: Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 125 Focal Length: 8.5 mm
Image 10: Shutter Speed: 1/125 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 11: Shutter Speed: 1/1250 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 12: Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 125 Focal Length: 8.5 mm
Image 13: Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm	Image 14: Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 125 Focal Length: 8.5 mm Link to RAW file	Image 15: Shutter Speed: 1/40 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 160 Focal Length: 8.5 mm Link to RAW file
Image 16: Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: f 3.5 ISO: 250 Focal Length: 8.5 mm Link to RAW file