Lousy picture quality

Author's Rating:

Pros: Small, takes rechargeable and standard AA batteries, comes with 64MB SD memory

Cons: Poor picture quality at best setting, no case or docking station

The Bottom Line: 
For this price, compare indoor flash picture quality before choosing a digital camera.

Author's Review
This is my third serious digital camera. My second was a 4MP HP that I bought at Costco. I really liked it, but it was accidentally turned on in a cupholder of a golf cart and the zooming mechanism broke trying to extend the lens.

So when I was at Costco I looked at replacements. This Pentax S40 looked great, nice and small and a little less expensive. I brought it home and took quite a few test pictures indoors with the flash with lots of different settings and was amazed how poor they looked.

The centers of the pictures were almost sharp, but anything in the background or not exactly in the center was kind of blurry and pixelated.

It's likely that it's the fault of the flash not being bright enough, but I took pictures with very bright ambient light and reasonably close.

I immediately checked the reviews here and didn't see much mention of this. I'm guessing it's because people either are taking outdoor pictures or haven't seen how well other 4MP digital cameras take indoor pictures.

My first digital camera didn't do flash pictures very well and it was really frustrating to not be able to count on my digital camera indoors. I really liked being able to take pictures indoors with my HP.

I checked reviews elsewhere and saw that several other people have noticed the poor quality too, so I don't think it's just my camera and thought I'd make sure that people here are aware of it.

I'd strongly recommend looking at the pictures that other 4MP cameras take before purchasing this one.

I'm sorry I haven't reviewed more of the features or the pictures in outdoor light, but because of the poor flash pictures, I'm returning it today.