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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 68 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Extremely compact; chic styling; generally sprightly performance; new quick-review button.
The bad: Fairly frequent underexposures; skimpy viewfinder coverage; no manual white balance.
The bottom line: This ultracompact, uniquely designed camera is hard to beat for snapshooting in style.
Specifications: Digital camera type: Ultracompact ; Resolution: 3.2 megapixels ; Optical zoom: 3 x ; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 06/05/2003
- Released on: 05/15/2003
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| To prevent accidents, Minolta moved the shutter-release and power buttons a little farther apart on the Xt. |
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| The mode dial lets you switch between shooting, playback, movie capture, and voice recording. |
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| The two buttons beside the zoom toggle can be programmed to access exposure compensation; white-balance settings; and ISO, color, and drive modes. When you activate the LCD menu, the three controls together serve as a four-way navigation pad. |
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| The buttons below the LCD let you activate the menu system, review and delete images without leaving shooting mode, turn the LCD and the current settings on and off, and make flash selections. |
You can save shots as uncompressed TIFF files or as JPEG files at any one of four resolutions. Three JPEG compression levels are available. The camera can also make VGA or QVGA copies of your pictures for easy transmission by e-mail. In movie mode, the Dimage Xt will capture 320x240-pixel MPEG video with sound as long as your storage media's capacity allows. You can also record 15-second audio photo captions and 180-minute separate voice memos. The Xt's design makes this model especially well suited to doubling as a voice recorder, which might appeal to business users and students, but its microphone isn't powerful enough to clearly capture speech from someone more than a few yards away. Finally, you can hook up the Dimage Xt to a Windows PC (but not a Mac) via a USB cable and use it for live videoconferencing. The camera can stand upright in the included battery-charging dock, so it's a handy videoconferencing stand, too. The dock will also charge a battery alone.
The Dimage Xt doesn't accept accessories such as supplemental lenses and external flashes, but oddly, it has an underwater housing: the MC-DG200 Marine Case, listed at $249.95. It might be fun in shallow water, but its 100-foot depth rating is pure marketing flummery. This reviewer will march naked down Broadway in the middle of February if anyone can show us a recognizable photograph taken with the Dimage Xt 100 feet underwater.Many snapshot-oriented cameras operate sluggishly, but to Minolta's credit, the Dimage Xt delivers quick performance. Start-up time is very fast at about 1 second, and shot-to-shot time runs a reasonable 2 seconds or so if you're shooting JPEG files. It's a less-pleasing 15 seconds with TIFF files, but that's no worse than what the competition has to offer. In continuous-shooting mode, the Xt can snap eight highest-quality JPEG images at nearly 1 frame per second before pausing to clear the buffer. Even with the flash firing, the continuous-shooting rate is about 0.6fps, which is quite good for a camera in this class.
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| The tiny optical viewfinder is reasonably sharp and bright, but it shows only about 81 percent of the actual image. |
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| The proprietary lithium-ion rechargeable battery lasted for more than 300 shots with the flash firing on half of them and the LCD on. |
The Xt's lens zooms quickly and smoothly, and you can control its zoom position with relative precision. We were also pleased with the 1.5-inch LCD, which is reasonably sharp, works adequately in both daylight and low light, and shows 100 percent of the actual image. The built-in flash's range extends to nearly 9 feet at ISO 100, which isn't bad for such a small camera.The Dimage Xt's pictures, though not the greatest in the 3-megapixel class, are generally good and rank among the best we've seen from extremely compact (sub-6-ounce) cameras. They're adequately sharp overall, although the Xt appears to be applying moderate noise reduction. The result is a smooth, low-noise image that looks realistic but suffers from some loss of fine, low-contrast details.
Colors are vivid and natural-looking, and the automatic white balance does a good job under a wide range of lighting sources. We were less impressed with ISO 400 shots, which showed more noise than average. Minolta wisely calibrated the automatic ISO setting to use light sensitivities between ISO 50 and 160. You can manually select ISO 200, which produces somewhat noisy pictures, or risk ISO 400.
Flaws in our test images included a few too many underexposures outdoors, and purple fringing occurred with some frequency. Other digital artifacts were rare.
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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 68 reviews
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