Pentax MX-1 Review

Menus, Playback, and Shooting

On this page we will take a look at the MX-1's menu screens, live view, and basic utilities.

Playback Mode

The MX-1's playback mode is very similar to what's found in other Pentax cameras.  One quirk with the MX-1 is that the info button has no effect in this mode.  In order to view information about your photo, you must instead press the OK button.  This is not labeled anywhere, making it unintuitive.

No picture information	Basic information only
Detailed information Not shown: press the down button to view copyright information

You can also pull up a histogram after pressing the OK button enough times:

While in playback mode, you use the 4-way pad to cycle through images, and the scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and to view multiple thumbnails. Pressing the down button will lead you to the in-camera post-processing menu:

This menu includes a variety of useful (i.e. RAW development) and not so useful options; refer to the MX-1 manual for more information about all the different features.

Still Shooting Mode

While shooting, you can choose to show or hide shooting information by using the OK button.  Below is what you might see if you choose to leave everything on:

We found no option to hide or disable the electronic level.  There is unfortunately also no focus peaking, though the camera will zoom in in manual focus mode to help make focusing easier.

The MX-1 does feature over/under exposure alerting, just like other Pentax cameras.  If this is enabled, overexposed areas will flash in red, while underexposed areas will flash in yellow:

On top of this you can choose to show a histogram and a grid (see the two rightmost settings in the center row of the info screen).

Info Screen

In addition to the main menu, the MX-1 has a quick-access info screen which is opened by pressing the info button.  This screen allows you to quickly adjust key shooting settings.  There is a separate info screen for movie mode.

Menu Screens

The MX-1's menus are rather sparse, but apart from an option to disable the electronic level, no key settings are missing.  The info screen (shown above) lets you configure many of the settings also available in the menu. 

The menu is divided into four sections: imaging, movie, settings, and custom functions.  This layout is used in all Pentax DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.  Because there are relatively few custom functions, and because of the overlap with the info screen, we feel that the menu system could have been made more intuitive for the MX-1.  A more customized approach would have been appropriate.

All the menu tabs are shown below for reference:

One feature unique to the MX-1 compared to other Pentax cameras is native eye-fi support (this is likely borrowed from the Olympus XZ-2).