Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 review
Its too bad this camera is now an orphan. Generally, I have been quite happy with it in the year and a half I have owned it.
As many people have commented, the CF door and the USB port cap are a bit poorly built, but otherwise, the camera takes a lot of knocks. I live in Viet Nam, and I carry it with me most of the time, so it gets banged around on my motorbike.
Lens quality is okay, but not outstanding. For the vast majority of amateurs, it is fine. By the way - it is rated at 2.8 at the widest, but zoom out just a little, and it goes to 3.5. The DOF is okay, but not as good as a quality dslr lens.
IMHO, this is a good camera for someone who is not a professional with the need for perfect optics and full frame sensors. This is a camera for someone who wants more control than a normal point & shoot pocket camera can provide, and who wants to take good photos. Carrying a dslr in my situation would mean I'd just have my walk around lens on it all the time, and if I'm going to do that, I may as well carry a good prosumer camera like the A2 so I don't have to worry about dust on the sensor.
Be sure to buy any of the good KM flash units with it. The built flash is okay, but will leave you little flexibility.
If you can find a good used A2, the price should be great as KM is now out of the camera business. It will be a good purchase.
Problems:
As noted above, the CF door and the USB port cover are both poorly constucted. I have opened the CF door a couple of times by accident, though I have never lost data.
Other comments about the AF are true - sometimes it hunts, though I have never figured out why. It is seldom a problem - just an annoyance. However, in low light, it is terrible. However, at least KM designed the viewfinder and EVF to go to B&W in low light, so you know to not trust the auto focus.
100 ISO is good, 200 is okay, but 400 and 800 have huges amounts of noise.
I had a problem with vignetting at first, but found it was just the UV filter I had on it. I replaced it with a Hoya slim, and have no problem now.