Minolta Dimage Z6 - A solid camera for the price and features

Author's Rating:

Pros: Feels great, very little lag, impressive zoom

Cons: Some slight picture degradation at high zoom

The Bottom Line: 
A real winner in terms of ease of use and performance.

•• Look & Feel ••
Pulling the camera out of the Styrofoam, the unit looks very nice. It's silver and exceptionally shiny, though mostly made of plastic. While it is not exactly designed to fit in a pocket, it isn't huge either. It fits comfortably in both hands and has a good weight once the batteries are in. A camera like this is designed to be comfortable and lightweight, but caters to an audience that prefers to actually feel like they are holding a camera instead of a matchbox.

The 4 AA batteries fit in the handle and like most cameras of this genre, this doubles as the handle.
Also on the handle is the shutter button and the mode wheel. In the field, this is an exceptionally comfortable camera to use. The control placement is intuitive and the large base and protruding lens make it nearly impossibly to inadvertently stick my finger in front of the lens.

The one complaint I have is a real head-scratcher. The flash must be manually lifted. Say what? Yes, the camera does not automatically pop up the flash when it needs to be used. Seems kind of silly and was a bit of a problem when trying to take candid shots in lower light. Several times, I missed a shot because the flash was down. A curious design decision indeed.

The camera sports full auto-mode and every flavor all the way to full manual. I generally use full-auto, but often switch to aperture priority if I want to enhance the depth of field or blur the background to bring out my subject. Plus I like to experiment with different settings, much to my wife's annoyance ("just take the picture, already!"). The settings on this camera were pretty much in line with what I'm used to on my Canon Elan IIe: That is, select the mode and use your thumb to adjust the settings depending on what mode you are in. This is a fun, easy camera to experiment with and performs wen it's time to stop playing and get shooting.

•• Image Quality ••
The image quality of the picture taken is rather good. While most people think the megapixel rating
relates to picture quality, this is a misnomer. The megapixel rating indicates how big you can print the picture without losing quality. That said, the high resolution pictures that this outputs are fine indeed. The colors are not tremendously saturated, but here are various settings that can account for taste. The white balancing is excellent outdoors and casts a warm hue indoors, though skin tones seem accurate.

One of the things to look for in a digital camera is the existence of a purple fringe on some images. My Canon A700 had this problem, and the Dimage displays it only slightly. Most people won't notice, but for those who care, it is there when zoomed in all the way.

The camera boasts ISO ratings down to 320, but I noticed a bit of noise and pixelation in low light settings. This is not totally unexpected and the same thing happens with fast film in non-digital cameras. Going higher in ISO to daylight settings such as ISO 100, there was none of the pixelation or noise.

The main marketing piece of this camera is it's zoom. It sports a 12x zoom and from the outset it looks tremendous. You can zoom in really, really far, and this is the optical zoom, not some cruddy digital zoom. Fully zoomed in is when the purple edging occurs, and images produced with this zoom seem to lose a minor amount of detail. Not much, but slightly noticeable.

The anti-shake feature is fantastic. It differs technically from most anti-shake systems, but creates a noticeable difference in shake. I turned off the AS, zoomed in on a distant object and shook the camera. As expected, it shook dramatically. Then I turned on the AS and zoomed in to the same point. While no one will confuse it with a Steadicam, the difference was dramatic. The camera was much more still and the shake exacerbated by the zoom, was not as present. In the field, I was able to rattle off many shot from a descending elevator, even a moving car. The pictures turned out far better than had I not had this feature.

•• Shutter/Focus Lag ••
I love the lag! Or more accurately, the lack of it. Even in lower lighting, the time between when I pushed the button and the picture was snapped was minimal. I did not miss a single shot in my entire day of shooting as a result of any lag. I was duly impressed.

One of the cool things that helped when shooting soccer games, was the fast shoot mode. Even at higher resolutions which require the camera more time to write the data to the memory card, the fast shooting mode took pictures about 2 every seconds. This is not bad and is far better than I used to get with my old Canon film camera. An with a very large memory card, I could snap away and then delete as necessary. I caught all the game shots I needed and some really excellent ones I hadn't seen.

The auto focus was impressive fast even in low light conditions. I would say that it took less than a second to focus in excellent light conditions and not much more than that in bad lighting conditions. I have no complaints with either the shutter or auto focus lag. This was a real gem to use in that regard.

•• Screen ••
The Minolta Dimage Z6 has a 2 inch LCD screen which is bright and vivid. I'm more of an old-school viewfinder kind of guy, but in certain instances, the LCD screen was a nice addition. It is large and the colors are as accurate as they can be in such a tiny LCD screen. The information presented such as mode, aperture, AS, and zoom are intuitively placed and never get in the way of the actual image. There is a spectrograph (?) that you can turn on and off and for some reason, it appears smack in the middle of your screen. Odd, certainly. And since I don't know how to use one, I keep it turned off. I don't know how such a tiny spectrograph could be of any use, but it's there if you want it.

•• Battery Life ••
The battery life was excellent. Turning off the extraneous sounds and not using Anti-shake helps extend it. After a full day of shooting, I had well over half of my battery left. I use high performance NiMh rechargeables, so your mileage may vary with generic alkalines. But indeed, turning off some of the default features can go a long way to extending your battery life.

•• Memory Media ••
The Minolta Dimage Z6 uses a secure digital storage card and comes with a small one. You'll want to tuck that away and buy a larger one, especially if you use the full megapixel setting on lowest compression. I've tried the supposedly faster memory cards, but haven't seen a noticeable improvement over ordinary cards. As noted above, the speed at which the camera writes the data to the card and moves on to the ext picture is impressive. And supporting several gigabyte cards means I'm able to keep my entire vacation on one card.

•• Conclusion ••
This camera is simply great. While photo enthusiasts might balk at the less-than stellar image quality at high telephoto settings, the average camera person won't mind or even notice. For those wanting to get into larger format digital cameras, this is a model that will be hard to beat in this price range.