Konica Minolta Dimage G500
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CNET Editors' Review
The good: Very slim and portable; excellent image quality; manual exposure; selectable CCD sensitivity.
The bad: Small four-way controller; little wide-angle capability; no custom white balance.
The bottom line: This sleek, pocketable point-and-shoot is ideal for those who want to capture highly detailed images while traveling light.
When Konica and Minolta married last fall, the Konica KD-510Z became the Konica Minolta Dimage G500. Under either alias, this camera is a modest upgrade to the original Konica ... Expand full review
When Konica and Minolta married last fall, the Konica KD-510Z became the Konica Minolta Dimage G500. Under either alias, this camera is a modest upgrade to the original Konica KD-500Z, a 5-megapixel, 3X-zoom snapshooter that earned high marks for both portability and image quality.
The G500 retains the KD-500Z's sturdy, metal body; moderate eight-ounce weight (with batteries and media); and slim design. But the company slightly restyled the camera, encasing it in a new finish of dull silver and toning down the green LED that flashed to unwittingly comic effect on the original. As with the KD-500Z, you activate nearly all the features from within the menu system; it's streamlined and relatively logical, but its four-way navigation pad is still much too small.
Like its predecessor, the G500 is designed for basic snapshooting, but Konica Minolta has added some useful exposure options. A manual exposure mode now supplements programmed autoexposure, you can set ISO sensitivity from 50 to 400, and the longest exposure time has improved from the previous 1 second to 15 seconds. The camera also supplies a three-step preset manual focus.
Other major specifications remain essentially unchanged. The 3X zoom lens, with its 39mm-to-117mm range (the 35mm-film equivalent), still lacks decent wide-angle capability. You save stills as JPEG images to SD/MMC or Memory Stick media, choosing from two compression levels and four resolutions. In movie mode, the G500 will record 320x240-pixel MJPEG video with sound in clips as long as 30 seconds.
User Reviews
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stars 4 of 4 users found this review helpful
"Poor in-door camera" By
Pros Small, solid feel to it, good quality pictures on a sunny day
Cons MAJOR red-eye problem, some are even "white eyes" not correctible with photoshop. At least half of indoor pictures in medium light settings are out of focus. Takes a long time to focus in medium-low light settings, by the time it does my 3-year-old is g
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