Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 review

I saw a fair amount of critisism of this and other KM digicams from users and reviewers, but the more reading I did the more I kept coming back to this one.
Finally bought it a couple of weeks ago in spite of KM pulling its camera sales out of Canada.
I've owned several DSLRs and use them on the job for news, commercial and portrait work.
But I much prefer to use small digicams whenever I can get away with it.
Small cameras have several advantages.
1. Peope don't notice them right away, so you aren't as likely to destroy the ambience of the scene you want to shot by show up with a big machine poking out of your your face.
2. People are not nearly as intimidated by small cameras and will most often be curious about them.
3. Digicams operat nearly silently and come with useful features like image stabilization and swivel LCDs that allow photo ops and angles not as easily achieved with DSLRs
4. Digicams combine high quality wide focal length range zoom lenses in a very small light package.
Their disadvantages are lower ISO sensitivity, image noise and (to a lesser degree these days) slower operation compared to DSLRs.
The KM A200 combines all of the best features of the digicam and I've found, performs quickly, focuses accurately and produces really outstanding images.
Battery life is not short. I simply uses smaller batteries, so I bought a couple extras. They're cheap.
It has a harder time focusing in dim light. Guess what? So does every camera on the market that doesn't use a focus assist light of some kind. In fact this camera probably focuses as accurately and more consistently than any of my Canon or Fuji DSLRs or Nikon film cameras ever did. It may not do it quite as fast, but lets be reasonable, I can't manually focus in the dark any faster than it can.
Turn on time is fast enough that it's ready to go by the time I'm ready to shoot.
The lens is just oustanding. I've owned some darned expensive lenses and that little GT lens is really sweet!
Soft images? Yeah. I usually set my cameras that way and sharpen after all else in Photoshop. And the A200s images really pop with just a touch of sharpening.
The colour on Adobe RGB is really to my taste. I really like it and the JPEGs out of the camera don't look over-sharpened or over-processed. And the RAWs - ooh - the RAWs!
The camera is really responsive and amazingly flexible once you get accustomed to the controls.
Little on-board flash works great when you set it properly - just take off the lens shade if you want to shoot at 28mm and avoid a shadow.
Continuous autofocus tracks well when needed and, oh yeah, did I mention it takes great pictures?

Problems:

Had to send to New York to get a flash mount adapter to hook up my flashes and studio lights.

Wish I had bought an A200 sooner.