Throw away your SLR!

I have just swapped my Minolta SLR for the Konica-Minolta Dimage A200 having read good reviews. In my view this is the complete camera, particularly if you add the wide-angle attachment in to the equation.

It di take a few days of frantic manual reading and experimentation to understand how to work the A 200 but the point is that it seems to be able to do absolutely anything that you need. Very occasionally the programmed exposure and focus cannot get the right answer for you but you can see this immediately and easily take full manual control. Better still you can see in advance on the viewing screen what effect your manual control settings are likely to produce.

Brilliant anti-shake technology allows grabbed shots in poor light that would otherwise fail.

The colour rendition is better than any slide film. I have added a circular polariser and this is generally a good addition to any camera.

The A 200 is so light and compact that I now have no excuse not to take it everywhere with me.

I chose the A 200 partly because of its ability to create RAW files but I am not sure this is necessary in practice unless you really want to print some exceptional scenes. It creates very big 10meg files and so far I have found the JPEG Extra Fine setting the most usefuland this allows around 150-200 slides on a 1mg memory card.

After three weeks use I cannot claim to have explored all of the multitude of settings and features this camera has but the important thing about using it is the ease of finding the key settings that you will want to use. Another useful features is a quick "reset" facility which instantly restores standard settings to reduce the risk of leaving some obscure and unwanted setting in play.

A lot of features the camera has such as filter effects might be better left to treatment with Adobe Photoshop when the pics are downloaded but sometimes it is useful to check how it will look there and then before taking the pic at all.

Downsides are very few. I find when manually focussing that the viewfinder image automatically expands X 10 and is then a bit too grainy to see clearly. I do not really understand when the anti-shake can cope and when it cannot. The warning symbol that show the shake is outside of its limits to control appears almost never but some risky shots at long exposures in low light still show some shake effect. Fact is though that these pictures, taken in extreme conditions, would be unusable without the anti-shake.