Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6 review

For the money spent, I think this was an excellent buy. I bought my DiMage Z6 in September and have quickly taken it through its paces, shooting under a variety of lighting conditions.

I've shot well over 1500 photos and have even shot 500+ in a single day with the camera without a hiccup. The picture quality is clean, crisp. The colors are good. The ergonomics are very good, enabling single-handed shots for shooting video. The macrso are great, especially for extreme closeup shots. But it is the ease of use that I think makes it an excellent camera for beginners, novices or just a fun "tooling around" camera.

The presets are helpful AND useful and adjustments can be made very easily. Plus, there's always the "Bracketing" and "Progressive" settings if you're not interested in utilizing the manual image compensators.

The camera is an "outdoor" camera, operating at its best in natural light conditions. I have not to date encountered any "fringing" or color aberration, even in purposely overexposed shots or shooting into light sources.

The image stabilizer is pretty good. I recently shot in the Freer Gallery (which has very soft ambient light) on an overcast, rainy day so I was forced to use to long expoure times (0.4-2 seconds). Plus, they don't let you use a tripod, so you had to utilize bracing techniques. Out of 248 shots, there were only a handful that had blurring.

Overall, I think it is an excellent camera for an introduction to digital photography or for standard use.

Problems:

In my experience, night time exposures (even with a full moon)are nearly impossible and the photos that do come out suffer from considerable noise.

Again, in low light conditions, the DiMage Z6 is a little sluggish as the Auto Focus struggles to find its ground and this can be somewhat frustrating.

It also chews through batteries. And when the batteries are low, the camera gets angry - no Anti-shake, longer focus times, more blurred shots, etc. It says it can shoot about 400 shots on one set of batteries, but I haven't found that to be the case. I would say, under typical usage situations (using a variety of exposure settings, accounting for ample use of the LCD screen and playback features) it probably gets around 250 to 300. I know on the day I shot at the Freer in low-light, I had to change batteries before the second 100 shots.

The last thing is the camera body - I do not know how durable it is, but it is light-weight and feels that it couldn't take much in the way of punishment. I fret sometimes that if I drop it, that's the end of it.