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My new digital camera

Konica Minolta DiMage A2

On Friday, June 30, 2005, I finally got my long-awaited new digital camera, as a replacement for my semi-defunct six year old Nikon 950 (R.I.P.). After reading tons of camera reviews in the past three months I had selected the digicam model which seemed to give me the most bang for my buck (given that I couldn't justify the steep price of a dSLR): Konica Minolta DiMage A2. My Boston-based cousin Hans bought it for me in the U.S. and brought it to Norway for his summer trip here (in super-pricey Norway, this camera would have cost around twice the $500 it costs in the States).

The DiMage A2 has fulfilled — and in some ways even exceeded — my expectations. It is a totally lovely camera, in its mechanical grip-feel, in the placement and usability of the numerous manual controls and in its image quality. It has 8 megapixels, a great 7x 28-200 mm (in 35mm equivalents) zoom lens and heaps of useful features — like a wonderful "Anti-Shake" image stabilizer, which can eliminate the blur-problems with hand-holding in low light situations or with large zoom ratios. After a few JPEG tests, which are also fine, I have decided to shoot nothing but raw files, as they yield the maximum quality. I use the Camera raw function in Photoshop CS2 to open and process the raw files, which are natively 36-bit, into 48-bit PSD files. These raw files are 12 Mb, so I can get 85 shots on my 1 Gb Sandisk Ultra II Compact Flash card.

Down with JPEG, up with raw!

Plain consumer digicams all save their images directly to JPEG files. This is a Very Bad Idea, quality-wise — read why here (my writings).

To test the camera I took some Nordby family photos in the weekend of July 30-31, when the whole clan was gathered outside of Oslo. The image below is a portrait of my Minneapolis-based Uncle Helge, my father's brother and Hans's father. He's 82 and still very fit and alert.

The photo was shot at 1/60 sec at f/3.5, ISO 100, hand-held at zoom 200mm (in 35mm equivalents) — and its excellent sharpness undoubtedly benefited greatly from the camera's image stabilization. I'm totally sold on Minolta's film-plane image stabilization — and other aspects of their technology — and when it's time to consider getting a dSLR Minolta is very likely to get my business, and not Nikon or Canon, as those two handle their image stabilization in their lenses — which makes for expensive lenses.

This image file — 2230x2800 pixels and 35 Mb in 48-bit color — has been subjected to major work in Photoshop — 6-7 hours or so. You can see the original, un-Photoshopped image beneath the finished version. When the editing was done I made large (A3+) prints of this portrait on my Epson 4000 Pro printer, which turned quite gorgeous. I'm giving one copy for free to Hans, as thanks for bringing me the camera, but the other Nordbys will have to pay to get these prints of Uncle Helge.