Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 review

I have used this camera since April 2005, so more than a year now, shot about 5000+ images on various occasions and I am simply impressed even this day with what this little beast can do on pretty much every occasion, be it indoor school parties, outdoor walks, or nature scenes(28mm at the wide end really adds a lot comparing to many of the 35mm lenses). On the other end I added a very good olympus teleconverter tcon-17 to the mix to extend the zoom to 340 mm for wildlife shots when the opportunity arises.

The camera is small enough for my taste, so that it is not a burden to take anywhere, and it has all the features that one could want for such a practical package. Initially there was some bad press for the inadequate autofocus from this camera, but this is only the case in the "default" autofocus mode, in user selectable spot autofocus the camera performs excellently, and focuses very well even in very dim light. This is the reason for giving it a four in "ease of use" as you need to know a bit more about this camera to get what you want out of it. (also setting the sharpening to +1 in camera can give you a bit sharper images out of the camera straight, and putting saturation one up in the camera setting if you prefer "sharper + more vibrant" or to say Canon like images as opposed to the natural look that KM is set for by default)

I would say that was the biggest error on Minolta part that they have not used spot autofocus as default "out of the box" method. If the sales matched the quality, features for the price of this camera as it should have perhaps KM would have sold enough to make them prolong their stay in the digital photography business, but unfortunately this is the last of this type of camera on the market from Minolta. Many of the other good features are already discussed by other posters, it would not be a mini-review if I was to describe them all

Problems:

Autofocus with the default setting, but as I earlier mentioned this is not really a problem. Very dissapointed that this is the end of the line for Minolta developed cameras in this segment of the market, or overall. At least they finished on a high so to say.