Konica Minolta DiMAGE 7i Digital Camera

A camera to give superb results. Minolta joined with Konica, and their products are now marketed under the joint Minolta-Konica name, but sadly in January 2006 they announced they were pulling out of the digital camera market and now only manufacture and supply other products, such as colour copiers etc.
Only one complaint, the 4 AA batteries when fully charged, will not last for long, so you need to have a spare fully charged set to hand, or better still it is feasible to use a separate 6 volt battery shoulder carry pack with a flying plug in lead. There is also a 6 volt unit mains powered unit available, recommended when you are downloading images from the flash memory into your computer, to use the mains powered unit. The zoom lens is incredible, going from quite wide angle to a strong telephoto. If the latter is used at maximum and the digital zoom is simultaneously used, you will photograph things on the horizon practically invisible with the unaided human eye. Only when you download to your computer do you then appreciate the image !
There are four picture quality settings. At the highest, the 7 megapixel setting, the processing time of transferring the image to the flash memory takes about 3 seconds, but I find that the 3rd setting is more than sufficient for superb quality, and the processing time for that is almost instant. The automatic focus is a bonus, light pressure on the shutter button activates that, and a brief beelp and red square seen on the LCD indicates focus found, and more pressure takes the picture. peelwhite

Konica Minolta Dimage 7i

This was a very expensive camera at it's introduction.
It has a magnesium alloy chassis.
It looks a little clunky by today's standards, but is still a nice camera.

What I like about it.
Lens, 28-200mm f2.8-3.5 so quite quick, would be expensive on an SLR
Manual zoom on a ring, you don't have to press UP/DOWN buttons.
Batteries, takes 4AAs, so you can keep it going forever. Runs well on NiMh cells.
Media takes the same CF cards that you already have for your DSLR
Focusing is three zone, fast & quite reliable, shows you which zone operated.
Image zooms to enable manual focusing if you wish to over-ride the camera.
Eye detector switches from rear LCD to the handy swivelling viewfinder. (Clever)
Switches to black & white in the finder in very low light.
There is fairly low shutter lag, you will probably get the fast moving object snapped.
(The 7i is quite an improvement on the original 7 version)

What I don't like so much.
Viewfinder isn't very high resolution, is good enough though.
Flash base is a Minolta standard, a flash will cost much more than a 7i.

I’ve been using a Minolta compact 4MP camera for some time now. It compares well with decent film compacts but, like them, is no match for a quality SLR camera. However, with the convenience of digital, I found my film equipment was falling into disuse. So what to do about it?

The latest digital ‘compacts’ sell quite cheaply, and offer astounding resolutions. 8 to 10 Mega Pixels is not unusual, and you might think this should allow a true poster-size print. But whoever managed a print that big from an autofocus compact? The lenses just aren’t up to it. You might not find any pixellation, but your picture will be just plain blurred! And that’s where the Dimage 7i comes in.

Here we have seriously good optics – a powerful zoom range with low distortions, positive manual zoom control and, if you want it, a useful manual focus ring (precise even though it’s electric, and with the facility at the touch of a button to magnify the image in the viewfinder or the screen x4 to check sharpness). The camera’s great with other manual controls as well. When a compact camera has override features, the body is just too small to have them accessible, so they tend to be buried deep inside menus – but the Dimage 7i, being that bit bigger, has space for far more useful controls at the fingertips. This is much more than just a ‘point and shoot’ camera, though it works well enough in this way if that’s all you are looking for.

So what’s the down-side? More modern digital cameras tend to have large screens – this one, though it’s bright and works even in very low light (transforming itself to black and white with almost night-vision quality), is not particularly large. And as digital SLRs go, this is not a ‘real’ one – the through-the-lens viewfinder is electronic, not optical, and its image quality could be a bit sharper. (But it’s useful, all the same, giving all the information you would expect from an SLR viewfinder). And, a lens this good really could benefit from the latest high-resolution CCDs (image sensors), so this camera is slightly limited by its 5MP resolution. But it’s perfectly good for, say, an A3 print – and how many times would you really need more than that? In the end, that is probably why these cameras are now so cheap. Aimed at the ‘prosumer’ market, those who were prepared to spend the earth on them new are now taking out mortgages to buy the latest digital SLR equipment – so these early ones are going for a song. But don’t be fooled by the low price!

Small? No. This was never meant to be a 'compact' camera.
Good for posing? Not particularly. The competition from Olympus looks much more the part.

But these are serious kit, and will serve the discerning amateur very well indeed.

PS: Worth upgrading to the latest firmware (version 1.11e) - but as long as your PC can write to the camera's CF card, this is easily achieved from the Minolta web site.