Pop-up Flash
The DiMAGE 7's internal flash has a quoted range of wide: 0.5 - 3.8 m (1.6 - 12.5 ft) and tele: 0.5 - 3 m (1.6 - 9.8 ft) (at ISO 100). The flash is activated by popping it up (physically flick the left or right edge of the flash upwards).
Images re-saved to sRGB colour space [info]
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| Skin tone test: Not a bad performance, a little too much flash power for my liking (though you can set this through the camera menu) | Wide angle white wall: At full wide angle (28mm equiv.) the pop-up flash doesn't quite have the cover to reach into the corners. | Color patch test: A commendable performance, good balance, good power and nice colour (after being run through the Minolta Image Viewer) |
Data Imprint
The DiMAGE 7 allows you to imprint data onto the bottom corner of the image before it is saved. You can choose from date, date/time, text ID and text ID + counter. I personally wouldn't use this feature (you're effectively damaging the image, plus things like date/time can be retrieved from the EXIF header later), but it may be of use to some. Below are examples of the different types of data imprint (these are crops of the bottom corner of each image).
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| Imprint: None | Imprint: Date |
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| Imprint: Text | Imprint: Text + Counter (ID) |
Movie Clips
You can take movie clips up to 60 seconds in length, they are recorded in Microsoft AVI format at 320 x 240, 12 frames per second. The DiMAGE 7 does not have a microphone, so no audio is recorded. I found it pretty difficult to shoot a movie of a moving subject at medium - long focal lengths (anything past approx. 75 mm equiv.) as the camera switches to continuous focus (which doesn't work very well).
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| Click above to load movie (1,989 KB) |
Timelapse
The DiMAGE 7 can be set up to automatically record frames every 1 - 60 minutes. To test this I set up the camera pointing at a construction crane in the process of being erected. The timelapse settings were for 120 frames, one frame every 2 minutes. The images files were then resized and run through Adobe Premiere to produce the movie file available below. I was disappointed to see that on several occasions the D7 metered the scene incorrectly (metering was set to Mult iSegment) which ended up in the over-exposed frames you'll see in the movie).
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| Click above to load movie (3,868 KB) |
