For all the family, and technophobes, this camera is small (palm of your hand), light, easy to use and the functions are not too difficult to get to grips with.
Within a 15 minute period, I was taking colour, sepia and black and white photos. The video function (including excellent sound quality!) is as easy as taking a photo. The more complex functions to take specific photo types, such as sport, landscape, night-vision and the like, took me a further 5 minutes.
The external controls are in the right places (for a right hander) to use with ease and there is no fiddling to make sure your fingers are in the right spot. The only issue I would have with external features is that the mic' for the video is in the top right of the case, right where people with larger hands than mine would curl their fingers round.
At 1600x1200, I could get 496 fine (5mp) pics or 23m 40s (15fps) on a 512 mb card. No internal memory though.
My wife and I both liked the menu system - one key to get there, then easy navigation.
Drawbacks - difficult to think of any, really, though the battery cover looks like care will be needed over the long term. A little flimsy, perhaps (the lithium battery took less than the advertised time to charge and we have messed around with it (½ hour) then taken the allotted video space on the card, re-played the video countless times and transferred to PC - and it still hasn't shown as low!!). As far as the video goes, better compression would be appreciated, though as SD cards come down in price they'll soon be similar to DV tapes anyway.
If you want to take video of school concerts, short video clips at the beach or on holiday (without taking larger camcorders), as well as superb quality pictures with only a single device, then at this price range, it's the one for you.
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![Konica Minolta Dimage X50 Digital Camera [5MP , 2.8 x Optical , 2" LCD] SILVER](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/123378628.jpg "Konica Minolta Dimage X50 Digital Camera [5MP , 2.8 x Optical , 2\" LCD] SILVER")
Apr 12th, 2005
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