Ian Hayden
Well-known member
When you first pick up this camera it feels just right, it fits well in the hand and all the controls are just where you want them, the lens is superb, and despite the rather cheap feel to the manual zoom action, the focal range is spot on and a good all round lens.
I found the autofocus system to work reasonably well in most lighting conditions. The build quality is excellent apart from the sprung loaded CF door which does not have a lock, this tends to stick to your palm and open
partially when you move the camera in the hand. Not a big deal as there is no interlock; but a bit annoying.
Battery life is very good and I found the menu system , general speed and features to be much better than expected. I used the Antishake system and can happily report that it works well. I fell in love with this camera but
as you will see from the problems section this was to be a brief encounter.
Problems:
The image quality was very dissapointing, I found that the Auto setting did not produce reasonable results, the images tend to be underexposed, low contrast / saturation, but the worst thing is the noise, which viewed at 100% is visable at 100ISO and VERY obvious at higher speeds. Minolta even say that they do not recommend using above 100 ISO. this is a very sensitive subject with them; they have a 3 page white paper on the subject. Its true that these things can be fixed with photoshop, but it seems that nearly every image needs post production work, some people have posted excellent results from this camera, all I can say is that I was not able to come close and for day to day shots not prepared to spend half my life fixing shots that other cameras churn out without fuss.
I returned my unit for a refund, there is nothing in the price range (now its reduced) that has quite the features that this camera offered, but the bottom line is image quality and to me the unit that I had did not deliver the goods.
I found the autofocus system to work reasonably well in most lighting conditions. The build quality is excellent apart from the sprung loaded CF door which does not have a lock, this tends to stick to your palm and open
partially when you move the camera in the hand. Not a big deal as there is no interlock; but a bit annoying.
Battery life is very good and I found the menu system , general speed and features to be much better than expected. I used the Antishake system and can happily report that it works well. I fell in love with this camera but
as you will see from the problems section this was to be a brief encounter.
Problems:
The image quality was very dissapointing, I found that the Auto setting did not produce reasonable results, the images tend to be underexposed, low contrast / saturation, but the worst thing is the noise, which viewed at 100% is visable at 100ISO and VERY obvious at higher speeds. Minolta even say that they do not recommend using above 100 ISO. this is a very sensitive subject with them; they have a 3 page white paper on the subject. Its true that these things can be fixed with photoshop, but it seems that nearly every image needs post production work, some people have posted excellent results from this camera, all I can say is that I was not able to come close and for day to day shots not prepared to spend half my life fixing shots that other cameras churn out without fuss.
I returned my unit for a refund, there is nothing in the price range (now its reduced) that has quite the features that this camera offered, but the bottom line is image quality and to me the unit that I had did not deliver the goods.