JPEG/TIFF Image Size & Quality

The Minolta DiMAGE X provides a good range of image resolution (1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 640 x 480) in combination with three JPEG compression settings (Fine, Standard, Economy) and an uncompressed TIFF mode (Super-Fine). The X does not have a RAW mode (nor are its users likely to ever need one).

Standard Test Scene

To give an impression of what some of the combinations of image size and quality produce the table below is a cross reference of some of them:

• 1600 x 1200 Super-Fine
• 1600 x 1200 Fine
• 1600 x 1200 Standard
• 1280 x 960 Fine
• 640 x 480 Fine

Images below are cropped 240 x 100 area of the image magnified 200% (nearest neighbour).

	1600 x 1200
Super-Fine	5,635 KB TIFF - not available for download
Fine	605 KB
Std.	396 KB
	1280 x 960
Fine	449 KB
	640 x 480
Fine	137 KB

As you can see there's very little visible difference between JPEG Fine and TIFF (Super-Fine), moving down to Standard we can start to see JPEG artifacts creeping in, I wouldn't recommend anyone use Economy (unless you are VERY low on storage space).

Colour space

Just like the DiMAGE 5, 7 and S304 the DiMAGE X is supplied with Minolta's Image Viewer application. I made a discovery in my DiMAGE 7 review that the camera was shooting in a custom wide gamut colour space and that images had to be run through the Image Viewer to covert colours into a standard colour space (such as sRGB). While DiMAGE X images can be run through the Image Viewer application there is no REQUIREMENT to do so as it appears the X shoots in the sRGB colour space natively. This is good news for a point-and-shoot camera.