The Pentax Q: A review.

The original Pentax Q, which debuted in the summer of 2011, was the most conventionally-styled of the Q-series cameras. It also featured the highest level of build quality.

Its sturdy magnesium shell was shaped sort of like a little rangefinder camera, albeit with a little hump just big enough to emblazon with the PENTAX name under the accessory shoe, where the viewfinder hump would be on an SLR-type camera. Despite that, there is no viewfinder, either electronic or optical; image composition must be done on the rear screen like with a point & shoot. Sacrifices must be made on a camera this small.

There's no sacrifice in the physical control department, however, unlike the early mirrorless efforts from Canon and Nikon.

Atop the camera at the front right-hand corner of the top plate is a prominent dial with the full array of PASM modes, as well as positions for Auto, Scene (the usual array of Portrait, Landscape, Action, Candlelight, etc. modes), Movie, and a setting called BC, which stands for "Blur Control" and will render some "fauxkeh" artificial background blur, with about as much sophistication as you could expect from a 2011 camera. The Blur Control setting allows shooting in JPEG only, obviously.

Immediately abaft of the mode dial is another control wheel, positioned at the right rear corner of the top plate where it can easily be twiddled by the thumb on the shooting hand. This controls the aperture or shutter speed in the appropriate mode, shifts the program in "P", and controls zoom when reviewing images in playback mode.

Immediately to the left of these dials are the shutter release and the tiny On/Off button, which is slightly recessed so as not to get jostled inadvertently. On the other side of the accessory shoe, on the left side of the top plate, are the playback button and the switch to pop the flash up. (And oh boy does the flash ever pop up, on a complex double-jointed arm that gives a surprising amount of offset from the lens axis.)

The back of the camera is pretty conventional mirrorless camera, albeit shrunk to fit. There's a bright 3" TFT LCD monitor with 460,000 pixel resolution taking up most of the real estate, while the right edge has the stack of little chiclet control buttons. On the front of the body are a focus assist lamp, lens release button, and a little dial that lets you select four user-definable presets.

The solidly-built metal-bodied original Q was a spendy little toy. Initial MSRP in 2011 was $800 with the 8.5mm f/1.9 kit lens, with the 5-15mm f/2.8-4.5 02 Standard Zoom available for another $299. That's the equivalent of $1100 and $400 in 2023 dollars. By way of comparison, the Canon Rebel T3i and Olympus PEN E-P3 were both priced at $899 with a kit zoom in camera stores at the time.

The Rebel T3i had an 18MP APS-C sensor and the Oly PEN E-P3 had a 12MP Four Thirds sensor, while the Pentax Q had a 12MP 1/2.3" BSI CMOS sensor, the size of ones most commonly found in point & shoot pocket cameras. It wasn't exactly a low-light beast, but between the reasonably fast lenses and Pentax's built-in Shake Reduction sensor-based image stabilization, it did okay.

The following shots were all taken with the 01 Standard Prime lens and shot in RAW (DNG) format, converted via Photoshop's built-in convertor.