Amazing quality, very few flaws

Author's Rating:

Pros: Killer lens, anti-shake system, superb picture quality

Cons: electronic viewfinder could be better

The Bottom Line: 
Probably not sturdy enough for professional use - but for the serious enthusiast there is hardly a better digital camera on the market right now

Author's Review
The famous killer lens, the anti-shake system, the plethora of adjustments the camera lets you make, the clear and simple controls, the superb picture quality - those are the big positive arguments for this camera.

Since I bought the A1 (5MP), it has been superseded by the A2 with 8MP. I doubt that this increase in Pixels has any effect on the quality of the camera, tough.

I've made about 2000 pictures with this camera in three months and can testify to the absolute ease of use, SLR-like controls and superb picture quality. Plus, this machine is quite small and light, and thus easy to carry.

So everything is fine? Well, not exactly. The electronic viewfinder is the weak link here. It sucks in low light situations, where it produces grainy, washed-out images.
Also, it is quite useless for action photography - anything faster than a bird will cause big problems due to the slow refresh rate of the screen.
A minor flaw is that the pictures you take with this camera actually look great on your PC monitor (where it really counts), but not as good on the camera's monitor. I "wasted" a lot of shots, thinking that I had to retake a picture because on the monitor it looked bad, when in fact it was fine. Once you learn to trust the camera though, and ignore the monitor image, everything is fine.

One very cool thing is that you can shift the focus point all around the viewing area - this is a killer feature when it comes to people portraits, or macros! Also very cool is the non-motorized zoom, which you have to operate by hand. This is actually much more precise and quicker than the usual motor variant - and it does not drain the batteries!

The batteries are very long lasting - I am usually shooting about 2GB of pictures (ca. 350 photos in RAW format) before I have to recharge. Recharge time with the supplied charger unit also is very good - it takes less than an hour to fill up the battery.

The camera will record images in a Minolta proprietary RAW format. You need to install the provided software to access the files.
The provided software is a bit on the simple side and I only use it to access the RAW files and convert them into a more common format (TIF). Then I use a standard picture processing program to tweak the contrast, colors, sharpness etc.

Bottom line: a great camera with some very minor annoyances which should by no means hold anybody back to buy this thing! It makes wonderful pictures and gives you control over any aspect of the photographic process.