Lightweight, with a manual zoom that is so much easier to use than those cursed push button zooms.

Swiveling LCD so you take pictures around corners and over walls, useful if you're a private eye or a voyeur.

Lithium Ion battery but see below.

Compact flash memory card, a movie mode, and a 7X or so zoom range.

The battery is dinky and as far as I know there was never a battery grip for this camera. There was an external battery Minolta made that was very expensive and was hard to find even when new.

Minolta has quit the commercial camera business, so there's not much support and no updates.

Noise is showing pretty well even at ISO 800 in daylight.

The movie mode is has lots of noise/grain, and saves them in Quicktime format, which not all movie editors support. Further, the autofocus will run continuously so it's better to leave it in manual mode. But you can get a whole 15 minutes per clip! Joy!

Achingly slow autofocus, I lost many good action shots because the !#$@! thing was chattering away trying to lock.

This is one of those "bridge" cameras that looks like an SLR but really isn't. Perhaps I'm too hard on it, but after I sold this for a D50- I never looked it's weaknesses outweighed it's good aspects.

As with most older cameras, used within it's limits it can take good pictures, but those limits are abysmal compared to what modern cameras can do.

Customer Service

Minolta no longer sells consumer cameras.

Similar Products Used:

D50, DCS 620X, D90, D200, D700, Pro 70, etc.

Great lens....f:2.5-3.5 is fast...light weight

View finder is poor

I bought this fifteen months ago to try digital photography. Most of my serious work I enlarge to 20x30 in. i previously had used Nikon N80 and Maxxum 7 film cameras for my work.I was amazes at the quality of the lens on the Konica Minolta. The definition was superior to anything I have ever gotten on film! The anti-shake is great; the only complaint is the viewfinder. If you have light coming from over your shoulder it's very hard to see into the finder.
I shoot at JPEG Fine and see no need for my work to even use raw.
I recently got the Nikon D200 and a few weeks ago got the highly touted 18-200 mm. zoom with their anti-shake. It's great camera and has a great lens, but honestly the pictures are not better than the Konica Minolta's. And the Nikon with that lens must weigh three or four times as much!
One thing you must not do with the Konica Minolta is to shoot at more than 100 ISO.
But with anti-shake and a f:2.5-3.5 lens you really don't have that biga problem.Great

Customer Service

Never needed

Similar Products Used:

Nikon N-80 SLR
Maxxum 7 SLR
Nikon D-200

Excellent picture quality, manual zoom, high quality movide mode, LCD display swivels 270 degrees for shooting over crowds. Minolta makes an adapter (purchased separately) so it can let the camera use compact flash or SD cards. Manual settings make night pictures and other difficult shots a breeze.

Small proprietary battery doesn't last long, the movie mode is limited to 15 minutes per clip and they are in quicktime format. This isn't much of a problem for me as I use it as camera first, but some people have complained about it. My particular camera has a hot pixel on the LCD. High ISO (800) is very noisy.

This is the ideal camera for me, it takes great pictures and high quality video up to 800X600. (15FPS for 800X600, all other settings are 30fps.) The A200 has a short learning curve, after which it's how good you are, not the other way around.

Customer Service

Haven't tried them.

Similar Products Used:

Hewlett Packard Photosmart 945, C912.

Great glass Accurate colour Auto focus Anti Shake Controls well laid out and intuitive Build and feel Most importantly, wonderful pictures

Manual focus a bit tricky with the electronic viewfinder and the LCD Lots of plastic Lens cap has no provisions for a strap Included camera strap is kinda cheesy A little pricey

Picture quality is outstanding. Excellent optics for a compact camera. The lens it fast and offers a good background blur when used with large apertures. Expect very little barrel distortion or vignetting. Auto focus is very fast and accurate, even in dark environments. Three different autofocus modes are available, one of them even allowing you to pinpoint any spot on the screen/viewfinder to focus on. Anti Shake works like a charm. Almost no noise at ISO 50-200, ISO 400 is a tad noisy but the pictures are still very useable. Auto white balance does a good job in everything but tungsten lighting; use the Tungsten preset instead. Built in flash is ok but thankfully this camera has a hot shoe. This camera can capture Raw files, JPEG files, or a combination Raw + JPEG. Build and feel of the camera is excellent. I recommend this camera to anyone who can afford it, even beginners, as the Auto program does a great job yet the advanced user can take complete control of all aspects of the picture-taking experience.

Customer Service

Have no experience with them.

Similar Products Used:

The only other compact I've had as much experience with is a Canon Powershot S50.