Minolta DiMAGE S304 Review

Timings & File Sizes

Overall the S304 was a good performer, its slowest function was power up, which is fairly normal for a camera with an extending lens. What's slightly curious though is that the actual lens extension only takes 1.2 seconds, the rest of the time is taken up with the camera 'thinking'. The lens extends no matter what mode you switch to.

Shuter lag and focus times were good slightly faster (certainly at telephoto) than its bigger brothers the DiMAGE 5 and 7. Shot to shot times are good if you disable instant playback and wait for the focus bracket to re-appear.

Timing Notes: All times calculated as an average of three operations. Supplied CF card (Lexar 8x 16 MB) was used for timings. Unless otherwise stated all timings were made on a 2048 x 1536 FINE JPEG image (approx. 1.1 MB per image).

Action	Details	Time taken (seconds)	Notes
Power: Off to Record	Lens always defaults to wide	5.8	Lens takes 1.2 secs *1
Power: Off to Play		5.1	Image is displayed
Power: Record to Off		4.1	Lens retract *2
Power: Play to Off		4.1	Lens retract *2
Mode: Record to Play		2.3	Image is displayed
Mode: Play to Record		1.5
Play: Magnify	To x2.0	3.1	*3
Play: Browse delay	Delay between images	~0
Rec: Thumbnail view	3 x 3 thumbnails	0.7
Auto Focus LAG	Wide focus mode	0.9 - 1.7	Average - Fast *4
Auto Focus LAG	Selected AF area mode	0.8 - 1.7	Fast *4
Shutter Release LAG		0.1	Fast
Total LAG		1.0 - 2.0	Fast to Average
Off to Shot Taken		6.9	Average
Shot to Shot	2048 x 1536JPEG FINE	2.0	Very Fast *5

Continuous drive mode

The table below shows the results of our continuous shooting test, indicating the actual frame rate along with maximum number of frames at a selection of image resolution / quality settings and how long you would have to wait after taking the maximum number of frames before you could take the next shot.

For some odd reason the S304 actually slowed down for smaller size (file size) images in continuous mode, however at anything less than 1600 x 1200 STANDARD the frame rate and write speed of the CF card 'broke even' which means you can just about shoot until the card is full (but only at one frame per second).

File Flush / Display Timing

Timings shown below are the time taken for the camera to process and "flush" the image out to the Compact Flash card, the timer was started as soon as the shutter release was pressed (shutter click was heard) and stopped when activity indicator LED beside the storage compartment went out. This means the timings also include the cameras processing time and as such are more representative of the actual time to "complete the task". Supplied CF card (Lexar 8x 16 MB) was used for timings.

Battery life

We ran the camera through our new battery life test. This test is designed to be fair and comparative to each camera and battery type:

• Take 4 shots without flash
• Wait 2 minutes (50% of the time powering the camera off)
• Take 1 shot with flash
• Wait 1 minute
• Repeat

All batteries had been fully discharged and recharged before the test and all cameras were reset to their factory default settings. Here are the results:

About what we've come to expect of AA powered digital cameras, approximately 2.5 hours. Interesting to note that the S304 did considerably better than its bigger brother the DiMAGE 7. It also got less hot (although still warm).