Minolta DiMAGE Xt Review

Minolta’s DiMAGE Xt is a very small digital camera indeed. It’s some 5 per cent smaller and 8 per cent lighter than the previous Xi model, and Minolta reckons that it’s the world’s slimmest digital camera. In practice, it feels about the same size as Casio’s Exilim EX-Z3 and the Pentax Optio S, but there’s one big difference.

It becomes apparent as soon as you start it up. Both the Casio and the Pentax have pretty large extending lenses, but the Minolta doesn’t. The lens doesn’t extend at all – it stays where it is. In use, then, the Minolta is altogether more compact than any of its rivals.

So how does it do this? It’s all down to Minolta’s clever ‘folded’ optical design. The image is reflected downward through 90 degrees on entering the camera, and the lens/CCD assembly runs vertically from top to bottom, with the CCD roughly level with the baseplate, facing upwards.

Start-up speed

Not only does the Minolta DiMAGE Xt retain its ultra-slim profile when it starts up, but the start-up time will leave you switching it on and off continually to convince yourself that a digital camera really can be this fast. How does 1.1 seconds sound? It’s what Minolta claims, and it’s exactly what the Xt does, and that includes the time it takes to light up the LCD on the back.

The AF system isn’t quite as impressive, taking around a second to lock onto your subjects. The zoom action is fairly leisurely too, but it’s possible to ‘nudge’ the zoom quite precisely. And because of the positioning of the lens (in the top right-hand corner of the camera as you look at it from the front), it’s too easy to leave your left index finger over the lens window. You’ll spot this if you’re using the LCD to compose shots, but not if you’re using the optical viewfinder.

The viewfinder is actually pretty good for such a small camera, and the LCD performs well, too. It’s good outdoors in daylight and copes well with dim indoor lighting – it gets noticeably grainier, but the refresh rate holds up so there’s little blurring or jerkiness.

The Playback mode works well. You access it via the main mode dial, and Minolta quotes an image display time of just 0.2 seconds. This means that you can cycle through saved images rapidly without having to wait for it to render them fully. Zooming and panning around saved images is a little more awkward because Minolta DiMAGE Xt combines the zoom buttons with the four-way navigation controls, so you have to keep toggling between Zoom and Pan mode.

Controls and usability

Indeed, while the four-way buttons do look quite neat, it is at the expense of usability. The central button in the row of three provides the up/down action, and the movement is a bit too small and vague. Worse still, there’s a central OK action that means that you’ve got to press down vertically with no inadvertent up or down movement to get it to register properly.

The other controls are very good, though. Beneath the LCD there are buttons for changing the Flash mode, switching the LCD on and off, Quick review mode and activating the menus. You can produce copies of saved images for emailing, which is useful, either at 640 x 480 or 160 x 120. When you transfer the images to your computer, you can then quickly email these copies as attachments without having to go to the trouble of starting up your image-editor and resizing images manually.

The menus reveal that this Minolta digital camera is quite versatile. In particular, it’s got a shutter speed range of 4sec to 1/1000sec, and automatic noise reduction for exposures of 1sec or longer. What’s especially interesting is that there’s no separate Macro mode as such. The lens focuses all the way from infinity down to 15cm.

You can change the white balance, ISO and EV compensation. By default, the left/right navigational controllers apply EV compensation, but you can reconfigure them to access the ISO or white balance options, or even Drive mode or Colour mode.

The up/down zoom control may not be brilliant, but in all other respects Minolta DiMAGE Xt is very well designed and surprisingly easy to use, given its dimensions. The aluminum exterior makes it feel solid and well made, too, though the rounded corners aren’t quite as appealing as the more sharply-designed (literally) Exilim EX-Z3 and Pentax Optio S.

But Minolta DiMAGE Xt does have some smart and practical features. You get a stand with the camera, which is useful when transferring images to your computer but also when charging the battery. You can charge it internally if you like, but the stand can also charge batteries separately – perfect if you like to keep a spare. It’s even possible to get an underwater housing for this digital camera.

But how does the DiMAGE Xt shape up against its two main rivals in this sub-miniature market, the Casio Exilim EX-Z3 and Pentax Optio S? It might not have quite the same cosmetic appeal, but it is some $30 cheaper and its non-extending lens design means that it’s much slimmer in use.

There’s not much in it in terms of picture quality. The Xt has got a slight tendency towards underexposure, but it’s far from serious and any images that are just a little too dark can easily be tweaked in your image-editor. Indeed, it’s a lot easier to fix underexposure than it is overexposure -as every digital camera owner will know, ‘blown’ highlights are gone for good.

Image sharpness is perfectly adequate. There are sharper digital cameras around, but the differences are small and many people simply won’t notice them – Minolta DiMAGE Xt’s small size will be more than adequate compensation.

Tagged with: Digital Camera • Minolta DiMAGE Xt • review • underwater housing

Filed under: Minolta

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