Pentax WG-3 GPS Review

General Performance

Even though we wouldn't consider the Pentax WG-3 to be a sluggish camera, its general speed and responsiveness is certainly not one of its strong points.  Its processing power is limited, and the camera suffers from a number of quirks which have been present in multiple generations of Pentax compacts.

Autofocus

The autofocus is generally fast; it works better at the wide setting than when you are zoomed in all the way.  At 18mm, you do sometimes have to wait several seconds for the autofocus to lock on, though it does so rather reliably.  In low light, the orange AF assist light kicks in to help the camera make sure its readings are accurate.  In the 1cm focus mode, the AF may sometimes miss the focus by a small margin, however.  If this happens, point the camera at an area of the subject that has more contrast, and re-adjust to the desired composition while keeping the shutter button half-pressed.

The WG-3's face detection feature works well.

If you do not half-press the shutter button before shooting and instead simply press it down all the way to take a picture, the camera will shoot using its "pan focus" preset, which means that most distant subjects will be sharp.

LCD

The WG-3's LCD screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9.  While this is ideal for videos, it means that there will be two vertical black bars on the screen when shooting stills at full resolution (the sensor's aspect ratio is 4:3).  These black bars can be hard to differentiate from shadows in the scene.  In addition, out of the box, the WG-3 is set to its 16:9 12-megapixel shooting mode, which means that it defaults to sub-optimal image quality.

Card Writing Speed

The WG-3 takes a while to write its files to the memory card.  If you take a photo at 16 megapixels (the maximum resolution) and immediately press the playback button, you will be greeted by the infamous "data being recorded" message, and an additional second will pass before the camera displays your photo.  This message is also shown for about two seconds after recording a video.  When shooting in continuous mode, the camera may lock up for an extended period of time.

We performed all our tests with a SanDisk 32 Gb SDHC UHS-I memory card. 

Battery Life

The battery life of the WG-3 is actually slightly worse than that of its predecessor, likely due to the addition of sensor-shift shake reduction.  After a day of use, you should always recharge your camera so that you don't run out of power the next day.  Expect to get about 200 photos on a single charge; this should be enough for most outings, but certainly isn't stellar.

Quirks

Below we list a number of other minor quirks that we were able to identify.

• When attempting to use the camera's HDR mode without a tripod, we would often get a "cannot process data" message; no image would then be saved by the camera
• Manual focus is extremely slow and hard to fine-tune when in the macro range.  It takes more than 12 seconds to move the focus from infinity to 1 centimeter
• Manual focus below 10cm can only be obtained by first entering the 1cm macro mode via the focusing menu, and then selecting MF.  This in itself is likely a bug
• After focusing/half-pressing the shutter, the live view display freezes for a split second
• Increasing the LCD brightness option in the settings menu can make photos appear severely overexposed even when they are not
• Even though Pentax states that the WG-3 has minimal shutter lag, there is approximately a 2-second delay between shooting consecutive shots in single shot mode

The WG-3's start-up time is approximately 1 second; we do not find this to be excessive.