So-called ‘bridge' cameras are supposed to span the distance between the instant snappers who really don't want to be bothered with loads of micro-management and the serious-minded photographers who ideally want a DSLR bristling with manual controls and custom presets.

The 12-megapixel Pentax X70 neatly slots into this category but is unusual insofar as this is the first foray Pentax has made into this genre. The company has included it in its ‘compact digital' range but the moment you lift it out of the box you know instantly that it seems a much closer relative to its DSLR cousins.

For a start, it doesn't resemble a stack of credit cards glued together but has a solid DSLR-shaped body, with a firm protruding right grip, a high quality electronic viewfinder (with 200,000 pixels) and a massive 26 - 624mm, 24x optical zoom lens projecting from the front. Despite this, it's surprisingly light (just 390g without battery and memory card) for this type of camera and initially we were worried that the weight might seriously affect performance, especially when it came to stabilising focus.

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However, once you've set your parameters, the unit feels comfortably firm in your hand and access to the controls is effortless. This is partly because they are instantly familiar to Pentax users - with the mode dial, zoom, power and EV compensation on the top, plus D-sub and assigned buttons for display, playback, face recognition, etc., on the back - and partly because the 230,000-pixel LCD is only 2.7 inches in size.

Now, if you've just nervously stepped up to this camera from, say, a Pentax Optio point-‘n'-clicker, then you can operate this machine in Auto Picture mode (which will choose the optimum setting from seven preset modes) or slip into Green mode (with its own dedicated control button) which is even more simplified.

Those wanting much more autonomy, on the other hand, have full Manual, Shutter and Aperture priority, three types of AF (including auto tracking) and metering plus a stack of shooting modes that should satisfy every eventuality.

The central question is still this: how well can you hold focus when using the zoom, bearing in mind you have a possible 150x combined optical/digital zoom maximum? Well, the short answer is: remarkably efficiently overall, thanks to a mixture of CCD-shift-type shake reduction and ISO high-sensitivity shake reduction when taking stills, and Movie SR in movie mode.

That said, the quality of the HD output in movie mode is disappointing, as for some reason the clips are shot at 1280 x 720 pixels at only 15fps instead of the usual 24 or 30. Plus there's no HDMI port, a connection which is increasingly becoming popular.

Yet the still photo quality is very impressive, both in terms of sharpness and colour authenticity, and you do have the option to manually alter further the degrees of saturation, sharpness and contrast. There's certainly a lot here for your money, including continuous shooting up to 11 images per second, Smile detection and a superb 1cm Macro mode for cracking close-ups.

The only obvious remaining downside is the battery life, which only promises you up to 170 stills before running out; that may not be enough for a full day's enthusiastic shooting.

The first dip into the ‘bridge' camera water for Pentax has produced a surprisingly lightweight and feature-heavy DSLR-styled camera with high quality stills and an efficiently anti-blur 24x optical zoom, but disappointing HD movie results.