Optio M20 issues with colors/sharpness

I purchased the Optio M20 in october 2006 and it has all the feateres I wanted in a camera (small, AA battery, video recording 640x480...)

Except I can't get it to give me nice pictures. I'm really just a point and shoot, and unfortunately the M20 does not deliver. I also have a Pentax *istD L (I know it's an SLR, but man the color and sharpness is amazing with that camera).

So since I don't want to throw it away, I would like to know how to take nice pictures (mostly kids pictures, 2 and 7 years old) and pictures at family reunion etc. I'm not trying to take amazing art photo or anything like that but the pictures I take seem to be a tad out of focus and the color seem a bit grey. I tried playing with image size and quality (no difference there). I tried lowering the ISO, made a dif at 64 but then you almost need a tripod (not practical with kids, I mean they will stay put for 10 seconds, but not more).

So I'm wondering if there is something wrong with my camera or is the M20 like that. I've been reading reviews that go both ways.

So I would like to know (without having to use a tripod, what kind of setting I should do to get the proper focus and the right color).

Thanks in advance.

I think in many ways these small compact digital cameras are much harder to use than a decent Digital SLR.

They are slow to operate, rely too much on menus to operate commonly used functions, are difficult to hold still and the small CCDs are inherently noisy.

I would try taking some pictures outdoors on a nice sunny day and see what the camera does under optimum conditions. If it can't deliver sharp, colourful shots then something may well be amiss with it.

It does seem to be a fairly common problem with M20's, mine's the same. In order to get half-decent results I have the green button set to switch the ISO and I keep the camera in Program mode. Most pictures seem to be OK with an ISO of 64, but occasionally I have to nip it up to 100 or 200 (never had to go higher).

It would be nice of Nikon to release a firmware upgrade to fix these issues, but as they have just released the M30 (with almost the same specs as the M20) I can't see this happening.

That would be very nice of them.

Dan

chabpa,

See my post concerning the M20:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3575

Frankly, the M20 is a very poor camera. OK, it's a 'point and shoot', but image quality is generally apalling and it fails dismally as an easy to use, reasonable quality compact.

You will probably find that if you set the focus to 'macro' and then take some close ups, then image quality is very good (see my cat picture). For some reason, any shots out of 'macro' mode suffer from pretty bad chromatic aberration (purple fringes to things like tree branches), and most shots seem out of focus.

I could be wrong, but I think Pentax know it's a duff camera, hence the sudden price fall (you can now pick one up for £80), and the introduction of the remarkably similar M30..............