Electronics & Computers Deals here!
- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 16 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
16 out of 16 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Overall excellent camera"
Pros: Very fast! lightweight and elegant and full of features
Cons: Needs fast card for high quality movies
Summary: What I like most about the Z5 is that it is very fast: from "On" to saving a picture in about 2 seconds!
Plus you have various continuous modes that allow you take many frames per second.
It is also very lightweight and compact with an easy comfortable grip.
What got in the way of rating it as a "10" were 2 things:
1. The card I got with the camera is a 128MB Transcend SD card and at some points it seemed like it was too slow for the camera, for example I started recording a movie at 640x480 30fps and although initially the camera said I had 2 minutes recording time left, after about 30 secs the counter turned red and the recording stopped. When I tried the same thing with lower resolution movies or lower frame rates, it continued recording as it should. I will need to get a faster card like the SanDisk Ultra and hope it solves the problem.
2. In my previous camera, a Casio EX3500, I had 3 buttons that I could use with shift that gave me almost all the camera settings in buttons instead of menus. I guess this is a merit of Casio rather than a shortcoming of the Z5.
All in all I really recommend the Z5 - great value for money!Updated
Well I went out and bought me a fast Sandisk 1GB Extreme and sure enough - no more problems with the high resolution movie mode.
I saw many people complaining that it is difficult to take low light photos with the Z5, and they are mostly correct.
The good news is that after experimenting for a while with the full manual M mode, I got good night photos by playing around with the exposure settings.
Three months later I still recommend the Z5 - although we need to wait and see what the new kid on the block - the Canon S2 - has to offer
...
- 2 replies to this review
-
Thank you. Finally, I found a review on someone that knows how to use the camera. There were those reviews about bad night exposure. Now, that I read your review, I am more confident to buy the camera cause now I just learned that it can be manually set THANK YOU!
-
Movie mode:
a) 640x480 30fps in fine mode will function with a Sandisk 1GB SD card. I've recorded 3 minutes of video at that resolution with no signs that the card was too slow. Therefore, no need to purchase a Sandisk Ultra.
b) Though the zoom in/out is fairly quiet in movie mode, due to the reduced motor speed, if I listen carefully using headphones to movies that I've taken, I can hear a whining noise coming from the motor. Also, at times, I can also hear some other mechanical noise when the camera is not being zoomed. I think that it might be coming from the anti-shake mechanics. But, the noise is minor and doesn't detract one from using the movie mode.
c) The other issue is that when zooming in, I find that the autofocus isn't fast. It takes about 3-5 seconds for the camera to figure out to focus the image. What strikes me about this is that you would think that the Minolta engineers would continuously adjust the focus when zooming in/out by using the assumption that the camera is still focused on the same object. I mean how often does one zoom in/out while moving the camera when in movie mode??? So in movie mode, zooming out and getting a quick focus isn't a problem, it's only when zooming in.
Digital camera mode:
a) Fast focus, long reaching flash capability.
b) Can't focus well in low light. Best to use manual focus at that time.
c) Focus indicator is on the bottom right of the EVF or LCD display and is indicated by a white dot. The engineers should have had the focus bars turn white when in focus and have it turn red when not in focus.
d) Photo review. Information displayed is comprehensive, but, doesn't indicate the focal length used to capture the image.
e) Minolta software. The 640x480 movies are recorded from about 1 - 1.5MB/sec. It would be nice if the Minolta software could support concatenating movies and also to recompress the movies using a different codec. Especially since DIVX/XVID codecs are quite 'viewable' when 1 hour of video is on a 700MB file. Storing 1 hour worth of video using the default .mov file would require ~4-6GB of disk space!!
Overall not a perfect camera, but, a good camera nonetheless. I don't regret my purchasing decision.
%20user%20review%20and%20rating%20-%20CNET%20Reviews&srcUrl=http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/konica-minolta-dimage-z5/4864-6501_7-31305784-1.html){kind=small}