Underrated glorified point & shoot - beware of hotpixels

Author's Rating:

Pros: Manual shutter, 6 megapixels, cheap, lots of features, takes memory-stick & SD/MMC

Cons: Proprietary battery/charger, slightly noisy pictures

The Bottom Line: 
This is a very nice cheap camera, everyone should buy one. They are a lot better than some of the crap Sony puts out there.

Author's Review
I traded my X50 in for this camera because I thought the X50 was a bit limiting and the pictures were noise-prone. The extra megapixel is nice too. I really wanted the manual shutter, etc. This camera was also quite cheap, 6 megapixels, manual shutter I would have expected to pay a lot more than £165 for it. Dont buy these in the shops, they will rip you off (250 in jessops). On ebay they often have new ones for £160. This is a glorified point & shoot, which is in between the digital-slr and ordinary point and shoot digicams.

The first one I got had a "red dot" on every picture, at first I thought it was just one hotpixel, but I later found out it was about 20, and it would come up with every ISO and shutter setting (except the ones longer than 1/3 second). I sent it back to them and they sent a new one back to me, without any hotpixels this time.

This thing comes in a huge box, as do most cameras. It is neatly wrapped in some sort of plastic. The battery comes half-charged, but you are usually supposed to charge them before you use it.

The box
The box also contains the following
-> Strappy for the camera
-> 16mb Panasonic SD card
-> CD with manual/wind'ohz software & win98 drivers
-> Charger & Lithium battery
-> USB cable
-> Short manual in a bunch of different languages
-> Warranty stuff which you hopefully wont need - I did :(

The 16mb card is nothing short of a joke, you can store a whole 8 pictures on it if you are lucky. I would recommend a 256 card, 1GB if you are going on holidays and not taking any card-reader/laptop with you. I have a 128mb myself, and it tends to get full fairly quickly. The good news is it also takes sony memory sticks, which are ridiculously expensive but if you have one for your PDA you can just shove that in there, at the same time as your SD. Of course you can always lower the resolution, but thats not why I bought a 6 megapixel camera, so I only do that if I really have to. Dont ever buy SD/MS cards in the shop, especially not if you live in Europe, they will rip you off - get them off expansys.com or ebay. It will also take MultiMedia cards & Memory stick PRO

Of course I have the strappy on my camera, so I dont drop it. It does tend to get in the way when taking pictures sometimes.

This thing comes with its own charger which I am not too happy about as now I have to carry another charger around, but I guess AA's wouldnt last too long in that thing as it uses 1.5 amps @ 4.2 volts. Still a pair of AA's would in theory last half an hour-40 minutes. The charger takes 100-240 volts and you can change the leads on it with a standard connector.

I have not touched the CD, nothing worth mentioning on it, not on the one for my previous camera anyway and this one is the same. I dislike that they have not printed out a full manual, I guess some wise-guy "i love my company" job-worshipper decided he wanted to cut costs.

The USB-Cable doesnt look like its a standard one, so I wouldnt be expecting everyone else's camera-cable to work on it. It already doesnt work on one of my other cameras.

Design
The camera itself is pretty box-shaped so it does not take up all that much room, and looks a lot like a 35mm camera, it has a conventional shape with the lens in the middle which I like. The case is made out of plastic and metal, slightly heavy but not too heavy. There is a little swivel thingy on the side for the strap. The LCD is sticking out a bit so its a good idea to put a screen-protector over it to stop it from getting scratched. I like the blue light that comes on when you half-press the shutter.

The battery case, SD & MS slots are all under the same cover. Which means you cant change card while the camera is on.

There is nothing wrong with the shutter button, and I like the way they have the 5 buttons in a row at the top. However I dont like the 4-way button and the tiny little menu beside it. I often press 2 or 3 buttons at the same time if I'm not looking at it properly or trying to do it fast. The menu button is also too "fidgety" and too close to the 4-way thing, and then theres all this blank space on the back of it. It doesnt have the jog-dial to switch between movie/manual/review modes but I always thought they were ugly anyways. You have to do pretty much everything through menus.

The lens-cover is sorta hard to open, I guess thats a good thing or it would be opening in your pocket. I often dont close it fully. Opening the lens cover turns it on, but you can just hold the little review button if you just wanna look at your pictures. To turn it off you have to push the cover back a little, wait for the lens to go back in and then close it fully.

There is some sort of a metering-thingy beside the flash, and if you put your finger over it while taking a picture the flash will be very weak and the picture will be pretty crappy, so if the pictures come out too dark always check you dont have your finger covering it. I made that mistake a lot at the start but later I realised it.

Interface

When I first turned this camera on I thought it was a bit confusing. The right arrow switches between the flash modes, left switches macro-mode on and off. Up lets you set exposure compensation and down switches between white-balance modes. However the up and down buttons dont do anything unless you enable them in setup->custom. The menus have some sort of abstract-background and I think they are slightly too long to navigate through them with the tiny buttons

Another annoying thing is that sometimes the menu-button will bring you back to the previous menu and other times it will change back to picture taking mode. Other times then it will change the value of something. Usually the left button brings you to the previous menu. I guess it makes sense in some weird way but it basically means they didnt put enough buttons on the camera, like no dedicated "cancel" button and no dedicated manual-exposure button.

There is a "quality" menu where you can change ISO and compensate colours, flash, contrast etc and you can save these settings in 2 slots, then turn it off when you want it all automatic. There are 5 ISO settings: auto, 50, 100, 200 and 400. There is also a resolution menu where you can change the resolution {640x480, 1600x1200, 2272x1704 & 2816x2112} and for each of these you can set compression to fine or standard. Unlike some cameras the "quality" menu doesnt have anything to do with resolution, which is the way it should be. There is also a "slow shutter" menu where you can sort of set the shutter speed manually, with 2 different settings for flash and without flash. I dont know why its in there since it has another manual shutter menu. From that menu you can only select from 1 second to 1/125th of a second.

You have to turn on manual-exposure from the menu, and when its on you can change the shutter speed with left and right buttons, up will let you switch between flash/shutter speed settings again this is sort of confusing and slow because of the lack of buttons.

You can resize pictures from the camera so I guess thats handy if you dont want to be resizing them from the computer. One thing I noticed it doesnt have much of the silly stuff my other camera had, like the multi-continuous thing where it would take 16 pictures and put them all on one file in some sort of a grid, you cant put borders around the pictures or any of that stuff. It doesnt have all the pre-sets, except for landscape but I never really used them anyway so thats okay. I dont really need that kind of stuff but some people might want it. They are usually non-features anyway. Exposure compensation, white balance and AE can be set from the menu. You can also set the brightness of the LCD.

The "memory priority" thing lets you select which memory it will fill up first. When the selected memory is full it will beep & display a message that it is full and switch to the other one. The rather confusing "custom" menu lets you choose which options are available during picture taking mode, for example custom->flash lets you choose which flash modes it will switch through, so if you never use red-eye reduction you can turn it off and it wont come up when you push the flash-button when you are taking a picture. I have landscape turned off because I never use that. There are also 1m, 2m and 4m modes but you have to turn them on from the custom menu.

You can look at pictures with the lens closed, the zoom controls let you multi-up and zoom in & out on pictures. On low resolution pictures you cant zoom in far, like for 640x480 images it only lets you zoom to 3.3 but you can zoom in to 14.7 2816x2112. Large pictures take a few seconds to load, so its sort of slow browsing through them unless you use the multi-up. You can also copy/move pictures from SD to MS with the camera.

Overall the interface is somewhat confusing due to the same buttons doing different things in different menus. But once you understand it its okay.

Taking pictures
First of all there is a "info disp" feature that you can turn on from setup, it lets you see the time, date, resolution, compression, memory in use, battery & a grossly misunderestimated free exposures count. For a 16mb card it says 5, but I can easily take 8 on one, often more.

When you half-press the shutter release a blue light comes on and it displays the shutter speed & F it intends to use. If you are using manual shutter it shows exposure compensation. It annoys me that it doesnt display ISO because once I took about 40 pictures at 400 ISO and didnt realise it, most of them were noise-ridden crap so I deleted them. You have to set up ISO rating & enable manual shutter from the menu. White balance & exposure compensation you can change with the 4-way button if you have it set up. You can really see that every button is being milked for what its worth & that they really could have put another few buttons on it. I think it takes too many clicks to do certain things, like changing contrast compensation.

If you set the shutter speed to less than 1/2.5s it does some anti noise processing which can take a few seconds. There is no shutter lag worth mentioning. It takes about 2 seconds to focus in macro mode, 1 normally & even less in landscape mode. It shows the pictures on the screen after you have taken them, you can set it to display them even longer if you turn "quick view" on. Quickview slows things down a lot in continuous mode though.

Battery
This thing takes a proprietary lithium battery which the kind folks at Konica Minolta can stop making whenever they please. Of course a trained & certified battery technician will be able to recycle it or make a new one your average user will be stuck with a useless camera. With some luck some asian company may start making knock offs - but those are known to explode. I have zillions of rechargeable AA/AAA batteries so it would be easy for me to take those, I could take batteries for a whole holiday. It is annoying that I have to charge my camera first before going on a picture-taking adventure. You can charge a lithium battery whenever you like without worrying about memory effect. If you are not planning to use it for a while, take out the battery and put it in the fridge, that way it will only loose 1% of its capacity every year. You can easily take 200 pictures with it provided you dont spend too long gawking at the screen.

Picture quality
The pictures are great most of the time. A bit blurry sometimes because long shutter time. The shutter doesnt automatically set itself to longer than 1/8 of a second.. so you should be able to hold it still for that long. The blur is usually due to the person holding the camera, not the camera itself. But you always get muppets blaming the camera because they dont know how to take a picture. There is also no "blur warning" but it does show you the shutter speed it intends to use

Noise.. 400 ISO is almost useless, it tends to destroy pictures with noise. But then again I have taken pictures with 400 ISO that are pretty much perfect, and I have had 100 ISO pictures ruined by it. Of course the pictures are huge so you can enlarge them quite a bit. High res pictures are usually 1.8~2.5mb. Because of compression if you take a picture in a very dark room it will be a lot less.

Sound/Video
It can take sound-clips of 30 seconds which is a joke, how much can one say in 30 seconds? the X50 can keep taping till the card is full, it doubles as a digital dictaphone but this thing has some foolish 30 second limit on it. The same goes for the video. The microphone picks up more background noise than sound so it isnt great. Video quality is good though, not grainy or anything even though its really low-res. You can set it to make a sound when it turns on/focuses/takes pictures. I only have it set to beep after taking a picture, of course you can turn it off when you are spying on someone. There is a 19th century shutter sound on it that sounds like a person blowing his nose, I turned that off.

Computer interface
This comes with a not-so-standard USB cable, it supposedly supports 2.0, but I dont know. You plug it in and it comes up as an ordinary every day run-of-the-mill joe-average mass storage device which most operating systems support. I dont know if both the memory stick and the SD card appear as seperate drives in windows, I havnt tried that. The "memory priority" memory does show up in linux though. Transfer speeds are average, not complaining. Formatting cards with mkfs.msdos messes things up though, you can take pictures & the camera can read it but the computer cant, and neither can my Vosonic VP300 which I usually use to empty out my cards onto. Dont know about windows format. Formatting with mkfs.msdos also results in reduced capacity, so stay away from it. The camera's own format works fine, but I think it takes a little longer to format a 128mb memory stick than a 128mb SD card, but maybe thats just me.
I generally connect this to a USB hub, which is connected to another USB hub, it works fine so Konica Minolta's claims that it doesnt work on USB hubs are false.

Continued performance
Ive had a bit of a problem using this thing on continuous mode, using a SD card it starts to lag after taking 2 pictures, if I then hold the shutter down for much longer it will take a random picture after a few seconds (usually of my shoe). It doesnt seem to do this with memory sticks, or a lower resolution though. It usually takes a picture every 2 seconds, 4 using flash.


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Testing hardware:
16mb Sandisk, Panasonic SD
32mb Sandisk SD
2x 64mb cards, dont know the manufacturer
4mb, 16mb original Sony memory stick
256mb (128mb x 2) Lexar memory stick
128mb Kingston SD

Computer running Linux 2.6.10, Windoze 2000
Laptop with Windoze 2000