Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Dynax 7D Concise opinion

Have been using the Konica Minolta Dynax 7D (Maxxum 7D in the USA) for about a week now and have come to some conclusions:

1) The camera is very nice and hefty in the hands and feels like it can take quite a beating.
2) The controls, though intimidating at first, are actually quite easy and very intuitive to use, especially if you have some experience with old film SLRs. The only problem is that there is no quick way to have things like Exposure Compensation, Drive Mode and Flash Compensation quickly reset to default. However, you can assign your favourite shooting mode (P,S,A,M), colourspace setting, sharpening, contrast and colour setting sets to one of three custom memory modes so that you can quickly get to them.
3) Metering is good -- better in general than the dodgy metering on the Olympus E-1 and E-300, but not quite as good as Nikon's 3D Colour Matrix Metering.
4) Picture quality, and detail is virtually identical with the Nikon D70 (both share the same sensor after all) but colour response is slightly different.
5) The 17-35mm kit lens that comes with the Dynax 7D is pretty good. More empirical tests will follow later. Meanwhile, check out some of the pictures below (since they have been resized, they are NOT to be used as illustrations of quality)
6) Will do some tests on the anti-shake feature soon as well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like it's a good camera so far... especially for people who already have an investment in Minolta lenses/accessories. Other than built-in image stabilization does it have any special must-have features to make someone switch from a different platform?

Unknown said...

in a word, no.

its a great camera with good design, great build quality and nice lenses, but then so does Nikon and Canon.

Anti-shake is great but I honestly it wasn't a killer feature for me and didn't make as big a difference as lenses with anti-shake built in.