I paid £ 3 for this at a carboot,looks GOOD, small, compact, easy to use,nice build quality, BUT OH DEAR,the battery life, lucky i have 4 sets of 2600 AA batteries and a charger !! i have an Olympus c-3000 and an Olympus c-55 cameras, both take 4 AA batteries, also a Minolta AF 7000 camera all take 4 AA batteries and go on for ever , Pentax get your act togeather ! i also have a Pentax Spotmatic ! which has never let me down,what has happened ! .

Pentax claims this is not a common problem but read for yourself.

This would no doubt be an acceptable camera but for the number of shots you get from perfectly decent batteries. One to avoid.

Beware of the Aiptek Pentax Optio 50 - battery life is non existent even when the camera is switched off a full set of batteries (mAh2500) will discharge completely over night. You can only get 30 or 40 photo's out of a set of batteries in a day in normal conditions. Pentax tell me that they have 'tested to specification' my camera so this would appear to be standard performance for the camera.

I returned my Pentax Optio 50 digital camera today. I told them at the camera shop that I did not get ONE SINGLE good picture out of this camera. Of course, I didn't take it outside in broad daylight, but THEN it's likely to be OK. They were not surprised by what I said, and they had nothing good to say about the camera. I guess when I bought it they were more interested in commission then getting me a good camera. I have always liked Canon, and the A520 is ultimately what I got. This camera sucked in every way possible; from its flimsy body and thin plastic, to its complete lack of proper focus and useless flash. I took a picture of my 1 year old while he sat on my lap. I just held the camera out in front of us and took the picture, our faces were clear so close up, and it worked ok, however, our faces were slightly dark and not bad, but it was completely black behind us, and my son's blond hair looked dark red.

In conclusion, the camera sucks, and I wouldn't recommend it! Unless of course you plan to use it outside during the daylight only. That is the one condition I didn't test because I rarely use it outdoors! Factory settings have it set so that after you take a picture it disappears off the screen. Took me quite a while to find out how to get it to stay on, as you have to turn the dial to the little wrench icon and select it from there, and then it's even just on or off, can't select say 3, 5, 10 seconds, etc. It stays on maybe 2-3 seconds, and that's your only choice, on or off. There are multiple shooting modes, and I tried several, even the low light setting didn't help with my dreadful pictures.