The Best Bang for the Buck

Author's Rating:

Pros: Auto, adjustable, manual. Great zoom. Good pictures. Fast auto focus. Best Image Stabilization. Excellent value!

Cons: Menus could be more intuitive. Slightly slow AF at long end of zoom

The Bottom Line: 
This is a camera, for beginners and experts, is difficult to beat for the price.

Author's Review
I am not a novice, but this is my first digital camera. I no longer want to lug around a lot of equipment. With much diligent testing of many digital cameras, it took me over a month to choose this one. Is it perfect…NO…but for less than $300 on line, it is absolutely AWESOME!

Most everything said about this camera in previous reviews is, for the most part, accurate. However, its highest shutter speed is 1/1000 sec, not 1/4000 sec as in one review…and you do not need anything higher with this camera as its “anti-shake” or image stabilization is far superior to just about all of the others. (Most professional film SLR’s from past years had a top shutter speed of only 1/1000 without image stabilization, and we did just fine with that using a tripod for long telephoto.) Hand-holding this camera (and this camera is really hand-holdable) at 50 yards or more, I was able to get, on a cloudy, overcast day, a very usable full-frame, 2 megapixel image of a license plate using the combination of the optical and digital zoom That’s a 35mm equivalent of a whopping 1680mm and an impossible shot with a hand-held film slr.

The complaint of difficult low-light (and it has to be really low light for the Konica) auto focus is legitimate; but if the human eye cannot see a dimly lit object, how can one expect the camera’s AF to focus on it; so just switch to manual focus…no problem once you get used to electronic manual focusing. Even in dim lamp light, the AF is almost instantaneous and adjustable from continuous, to exposure only, to manual. (There still isn’t a low-light assist lamp on a camera yet that I’ve seen that works very well.)

The first thing I did when I opened the box, loaded the batteries, and put a 512mb sd card in it, was to put the camera on auto, hand it to my wife (showed her how to use the zoom) and let her loose. She knows nothing about cameras. We couldn’t believe the results. Almost, every, but not all, shots, except for composure, was usable, if not perfect. This camera is difficult to fool.

As for the flash shots, add an extra meter or two to the onboard flash’s stated distance. I am now almost regretting my purchase of an off-camera flash which goes out 40-50 feet because the onboard flash is more powerful than Konica’s specs. That a flash does not automatically pop up never has bothered me, but I guess it does bother some others. If you are in a light condition where you want or need a flash, you should know before hand that you want or need one.

I would have liked the maximum aperture of the zoom to be more than f4.5 if only for easier focusing, but in actual use, you do not need a larger aperture due to the excellent image stabilization system. Looking at it this way, with IS you get an extra 2 f stops…or while shooting at ISO 100, you actually are shooting at ISO 400…or at 1/50th sec. exposure, you’re actually shooting at 1/200th….and all the permutations of those figures. I have never before been able to take a really sharp hand held photo at 1/25th sec before.

The pictures are as good as any and better than most if shot at ISO 100 or less. They are good enough for me, and I am very particular. Any mistakes can easily be tweaked with software. (Irfanview is an easy and good free one...GIMP is another, but not for the faint-hearted.)

I checked out just about every camera on the market before choosing this one and THIS IS THE BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK…period without going to a D-SLR for at least a thousand more for the same features, albeit better picture quality. I am not disappointed.

PS. Konica-Minolta has been bought out by Sony Corporation. Sony wanted Konica’s image stabilization process. Konica wanted Sony’s CCDs. There will be no successor to the Z6, and probably no camera on the market that gives you as much for your dollar.