Aimed at advanced amateurs and photographic enthusiasts, Konica-Minolta DiMAGE A200 offers an attractive combination of features at an attractive price. Incorporating Anti-Shake mechanism, a 7x optical manual zoom lens, full manual controls, and a flexible LCD screen, A200 is an extremely versatile camera that delivers extremely high image quality. It has some regrets here and there but overall it’s a package hard to beat.

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The overall balance between a point and shoot camera and one that offers high resolution and manual control is about right here. The downside to the package is that you’ll have to deal with an overly sensitive shutter button and sluggish Auto Focus.

The DiMAGE A200 is easy to use yet packed with tools for the more advanced user. Picture quality is superb with noise controlled and colour well rendered; highlights are retained in all but the most challenging situations, there’s little noise to speak of until you get beyond ISO 400 in low light and handling is great too. Overall the A200 is another superb package from Konica Minolta.

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With its unusual prism-folded lens design, Konica Minolta’s DiMAGE X50, like the DiMAGE Xg, Xt, Xi and X before it, has a tiny, extraordinarily thin all-metal body. Unlike its predecessors in which the lens was vertically mounted, though, the X50’s lens is horizontally mounted inside the camera’s body - providing better separation between the front of the lens opening and your fingertips when in use. The new model is slightly smaller overall than the Xg was, and impressively (given the new sliding lens barrier) is only 0.1 inches thicker - measuring a mere 3.3 x 0.9 x 2.4 inches (83.5 x 23.5 x 62 millimeters). The Konica Minolta X50 is about a half ounce heavier than the Xg, though, weighing a light 5.0 ounces (143 grams) without the battery and SD memory card. This still makes the DiMAGE X50 one of the smallest and lightest high-resolution digicams on the market. With the extremely compact design, there’s no excuse for leaving it behind, as the camera can tag along in even the smallest shirt pocket, or be quickly tucked into an evening bag or pants pocket. The unique “folded” optical design means that there’s no wait for a lens to telescope out of the body when the camera is powered up, resulting in very fast startup and shutdown times. (It also keeps moving parts to a minimum, and protects the lens inside the camera’s body - reducing both power consumption, and the risk of accidental damage). The sleek design includes a built-in sliding lens barrier which doubles as a power switch, eliminating any concern over misplacing a lens cap.

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The Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 is well put-together, though it’s not quite as “tank-like” as its main competition, the Nikon Coolpix 8800. It’s easy to hold, and the controls aren’t nearly as intimidating as they were on the A2. I love the manual zoom and focus rings, too. The flip-out LCD is sharp and motion is fluid, and it is visible in low light conditions. The same goes for the electronic viewfinder, but I do miss the high resolution, tiltable screen from the A2. Other nice features on the A200 include its movie mode and support for add-on lenses and an external flash. And finally, the camera supports RAW and RAW+JPEG recording, with very little delay between shots. Konica Minolta includes software that takes full advantage of the RAW format.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3 is not too different from the Z2 model; it does deliver a fair bit of purple fringe but the pink hue distortion that I saw in the Z2 does appear to be corrected. I think it would help if Konica Minolta provided rechargeable batteries and a charger with their camera; all the Olympus cameras I have tested have been packaged with such goodies and since this uses up batteries like there is no tomorrow, it would be a very welcome addition. Image quality is good if you know what settings to use at what time, but for strict automatic point and shoot situations I don’t think this is the best performing camera. I believe you need to be an intermediate or slightly experienced photographer to get the best out of this camera.

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