Reviews for Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Konica-Minolta A200 Digital Camera

Strengths: Optics, ergonomics, features, and price.

Weakness: EVF, USB

The A200 is a full-featured camera that is a pleasure to use. The 28-200mm GT lens with its manual zoom ring makes framing easy and the results are sharp and true with no noticeable chromatic abberation. Focus is quick and precise in both spot and flex modes, but can be somewhat unpredictable in wide mode if not enough contrast in the scene to lock onto.

Image stabilization is super! With it, you can stay at lower ISO settings in diminished lighting and long telephoto shots without a tripod or the need for higher ISO settings with their increased noise levels.

The fully articulated LCD screen is a great asset. With it, you can take pictures from unusual vantage points without having to crawl on the ground. Great for self-portraits and shooting overhead in crowds, too.

KM has done an excellent job with control placement and menu organization. Most of the important controls are intuitively placed and accessible at the touch of a button or scroll of a wheel; the rest are easily found in the well-organized menu system. Not too big, not too small, the A200 is perfectly sized for travel and fits comfortably in my average-sized hands.

At 30 fps, movies are a blast on the A200 if not somewhat large filewise. There is a synchronization problem between the audio and video that has been widely reported on the internet, but it can easily be fixed through several freely downloadable video editing software applications.

On the negative side, the USB 1.1 interface is too slow for efficient off-loading of pictures to a PC. Invest $20 in a CF card reader if you don't like waiting. Also, I find the EVF to be inadequate for repeatable, accurate manual focusing. It's just too difficult to judge focus with so relatively few pixels. Fortunately, the A200 rarely needs to set to manual focus, and the AF performs admirably.

Highly recommended for the A200 is a quality, hi-speed CF card like SanDisk Ultra II. The A200 is fully capable of taking advantage of such high performance cards.

The A200 comes with the NP-800 Li-Ion battery and charger, cords for connecting to your PC and television (both NTSC and PAL), and a cool little wireless remote.

All and all a great camera that I can highy recommend!

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: image quality, manual zoom, anti-shake technology, rotating LCD, excellent ergonomics, fast focus in good light

Weakness: in low-light auto focus is slower but it usually achieves a correct focus, you have manual focus if it bothers you, comparativly I think it does a good job

Very impressed with this camera, used an old Dimage 7 before this camera and its quite an upgrade from that one. I've barely had it and have produced some amazing photos. Minolta does a good job of putting the buttons where you want them. Photos taken in Vivid produce some amazing colors. I've had great results with the anti-shake and hand held some long telephoto shots. Movie mode is good the only thing I don't like is it takes them in a quicktime format, don't know if thats a standard thing but I'd rather have a windows format so I struggling to find a good free converter.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Ergonomics, awesome anti-shake technology, Fast focus, low light capability, image quality, manual zoom, rotating LCD, 800*600 movie, unlimited movie length, warm "vivid" mode

Weakness: Not easy to tell when the image is focused with manual focus at extreme zoom. Battery life is a little short, you will need a back-up battery, EVF not good as A2, continuous mode could be faster

Almost all features, especially anti-shake technology, prove this camera to be an exceptional camera. With the anti-shake feature on, you can take sharp hand-held pictures at extreme zoom including digital zoom. The movie mode is the best I've seen to date. The ergonomics are better than others in the 8MP class. Best of all this is the lowest cost camera in the bunch (Canon, A2 Fuji 8080, Nikon)! Negatives listed above are minor and should not deter anyone from buying this camera (only for future design upgrades)

Very Impressive! Better than expected!

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Fast focus, low light capability, image quality, manual zoom, anti-shake, 270 LCD, 800*600 15 fps movie

Weakness: EVF not good as A2 and cannot adjust angle. battery life is a little shorter, you may need a back-up battery, AF in low light condition is a little slow.

Very good camera overall. Lens, noise, distortion, colors etc are very good for a camera this size and price. I like it much. I'm really glad I purchased this camera so far. For the money I think this is probably the best choice.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: X7 zoom staring 28mm, light, a lots of easy to operate controls. Can save 5 custom control sets. Anti Shake. Images quality

Weakness: Slow auto focus at low light tele-zoom. No cord to tie lens cover. Electronic viewfinder has very rough resolution

I was looking for Zoom camera from panoramic length (28mm) and fast lenses- step forward from my point and shut Kodak. I preferred Minolta A200 upon Canon PowerShot Pro1 ugly and Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom (heavy). A200 looks very much like cute SLR, just scaled down. From the very begining I am using controls very often, getting high quality shots even in difficult conditions. Relative to my point and shut this camera doing well in low light, also AF is slow, and sometimes fail. Otherwise operation is very fast (powerup, switch between modes, time between shuts). Movie clips looks surprisingly good. After I have dropped lens cover 13 times, I drilled small hole in it and tied with cord to comera body - as I had it on my old 35mm SLR. Other reviewers complained on memory and buttery covers weakness - those looks absolutely OK to me.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Motion Picture is very strong. Good quality of picures. Quite smaller size than other high-end cameras. Overall speed is good. Optical zoom is great.

Weakness: Hard to get exact focus with little light. Slow focusing speed indoors. Need one more battery for a full day. Big size of MOV file.

Over all mechanic feature is A+. Some minor weakness such as focusing indoors and plastic body. However the motion picture is very strong. Yes! You can buy camcorder for videos, but if you want it with one device, this will be the best choice of you. If you desire a high quality picture but do not have enough money for SLR, you can want A200. Excellent outputs with less money!

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Ergonomics, manually-linked zoom lens, live histogram (now that I know what a histogram is), articulating LCD screen, pretty much blur-free hand-held pictures even as slow as 1/15 sec exposure.

Weakness: Somewhat questionable auto focus accuracy in low light, playback mode sometimes sluggish (mainly when previewing movies) even with high speed flash media.

Ergonomically, the camera is excellent, and this is helpful when using such a camera with so many features as well as helps make the most of the image stabilization when shooting pictures. In shooting pictures, my main gripes have to do with low-light focusing. Thankfully, the manual focus ring is handily placed next to the zoom ring to quickly remedy the occasional focusing error; however, with the lower resolution viewfinder compared with the DiMAGE A2, it's not terribly easy to tell when the image is properly focused. Then in playback mode, the camera is somewhat slow bringing up thumbnails of your pictures when viewing several at a time, and it's very slow when you have movies in there as well. Still, these issues hardly tarnish the camera's overall performance, and it's one of the most impressive fixed lens cameras I've ever used, with features like a great movie mode and the live histogram that you can't get on a more expensive digital SLR. If the continuous shooting modes were faster, the A200 would be a very serious competitor for digital SLRs.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: It took great photos, and videos.

Weakness: I did not like not being able to zoom with the macro, and when you got too close the flower got out of focus.

Overall I thought the camera was great. This camera had great photo quality. The videos were real clear. I also like how fast you can view one picture to the next. There was very little wait time. One other small thing I did not care for was there was nothing to hold the lens cap, no strap. I also ha d problems with the macro and not being able to get close enough, if you are going to be taking mostly flower photos this might not be the one for you. You cannot zoom at all with the macro and if you get to close physically it is out of focus. Overall I thought it was an easy point and shoot camera. I would highly recommend the DiMAGE A200.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Good zoom, image stabilization, good image processing, good movie mode, excellent image quality.

Weakness: Long shutter lag at telephoto in medium/low light, plastic feel to the camera (the manual zoom should be more fluid).

It developed 5 hot pixels on the LCD preview screen within 5 days of ownership. The image quality is top notch for a small sensor camera at ISO 50-200. Noise is strong only at ISO 400 and 800. Blue banding appeared at high ISO pictures and tungsten WB, which caused me to send it back for an exchange. The camera really needs WB fine tuning outside of the "filter" effect. The camera does not "feel" professional due to the use of plastic. Setup menus can be a bit better organized. Too bad the shutter lag is long at the telephoto end in medium/low light. Full-time autofocus not too much help.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 8 Megapixel Bridge Camera

Strengths: Manual zoom, unlimited movies that can also use the zoom

Weakness: No focus assist lamp, the left strap eyelet to far forward, interferes with manual focus

The Minolta A200 is a great camera. It's easy to use and takes great pictures. I particularly like the manual zoom. None of the other camersa in its class can use optical zoom in movie mode. The movies are good enough that I use it instead of my camcorder. I now only have to carry one camera instead if a still camera and a camcorder.

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200

The recent (and still current) Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 was easily a Dave's Pick, capitalizing on fast shutter-lag, excellent exposure and creative control options, and an excellent image stabilization system. Though the Konica Minolta A200 is a slightly pared-down version of the A2, I see many of the same excellent features that I praised on the A2, such as fine-tuned creative adjustments for...

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Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200

A revamp of the 8-megapixel Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 model that features a slightly trimmed specification from the A2 but also has a few new tricks of its own.

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DCRP Review: Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200

While I was hesitant to recommend the old Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 due to image quality issues, I have no qualms about doing so for the new DiMAGE A200 -- it's an excellent 8 Megapixel camera. I do, however, wish that the camera retained some of the A2's features, but Minolta had to cut the cost of the camera somehow.

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