Friendly to digital novices and enthusiasts alike, the Minolta Dimage F100 combines innovative automatic technology and advanced manual controls in a very portable package.
There's a lot more going on inside Minolta's Dimage F100 than its plain little face suggests. It may be styled like a point-and- shoot camera and sized for your pocket, but a close examination reveals an exhaustive array of manual controls, as well as some innovative automatic features. Add a 4-megapixel sensor and a 3X zoom lens, and you have an excellent camera for serious amateur photographers who need both creative control and portability.
Slim and spry
The F100's greatest design asset is undoubtedly its pocketability: the well-constructed metal body is sleek and compact, the lens retracts completely behind a built-in protective cover, and the camera is comfortably lightweight at 226 grams with the batteries and the media installed. We found the 1.5-inch LCD to be a bit small. However, a separate black-and-white status LCD atop the camera--which lets you check settings without turning on the larger, more battery-hungry screen when you're shooting with the optical viewfinder--balances that minor liability.
Minolta has broken new ground with the F100's automatic focus and exposure system. When you depress the shutter-release button halfway in Auto-recording mode, the camera's Area AF technology evaluates the scene that you're shooting and locks the focus on your subject, even if it's off-center. If you've activated the Subject Tracking AF functionality, the camera will then track your subject as it moves through three-dimensional space. The F100 is also endowed with a Digital Subject Program Selection feature that selects either Program AE or one of five preset scene modes to optimize exposure and other settings for the type of subject that you're shooting.
So how well does all that fancy technology work? We got variable results in our tests, which, predictably, depended on the complexity of the scene that we were capturing. For example, when we tried shooting a person walking on a city street, the focus would sometimes initially lock on bright, sharp-edged objects in the near background (such as street signs) rather than the intended subject. On the other hand, once the F100 had locked onto our subject, the camera was able to stay focused on the correct individual as we tracked its movements for a few seconds, even though other pedestrians were passing between the subject and the camera in a different focal plane.
The Subject Tracking AF easily handled subjects moving at modest walking speeds but had trouble following faster motion. Despite that limitation, we suspect that the tracking feature will be a significant boon for users, particularly novices. We were less impressed with the Digital Subject Program Selection, which ended up choosing Program AE in most cases. That's not something that you need any special technology to do, and the camera's design makes it so easy for users to pick a special scene mode with the press of a button that the automatic selection doesn't speed up operation much.
For the manually minded
While the automatic features draw the most attention for their sheer novelty, the F100's manual feature set is not to be overlooked. In addition to full manual, aperture-priority, and shutter- priority exposure control, there's a limited manual focus. Spot metering, autobracketing, and a continuous-shooting mode that functions with all resolution and compression settings--at different speeds, of course--are among the many other advanced features. In addition to the manual white balance that's found in all cameras in this class, there's a WB Custom Recall feature that saves and recalls your last manual setting. You can also capture video clips with sound and make copies of your pictures in-camera. Some photographers may find the camera's short list of flash options limiting, and the F100 doesn't capture the RAW files that some more advanced Minolta cameras do; it saves uncompressed TIFFs instead.
A quick shot-to-shot time of about two seconds and the lack of a noticeable shutter lag make the F100 a pleasure to use. We also got good life out of the CR-3V photo-lithium cell and-- alternatively--the two AA nickel-metal-hydride batteries that we tried out. However, we were disappointed that we had to provide those batteries ourselves since this Dimage comes with only a pair of shorter-lived AA alkalines.
Overall, the exposure and image quality in our test shots was quite good. The most consistent problem that we encountered was that the automatic white balance produced a bluish cast in very bright sunlight. On the other hand, we obtained pleasing, lifelike colors--particularly flesh tones--in indirect sunlight and with both incandescent and fluorescent light fixtures. Our pictures also exhibited a good dynamic range, with ample detail in both shadows and highlights. And although large swatches of blue sky tended to show some noticeable noise, image noise levels were generally low. We also observed very minimal lens distortion and chromatic aberration.
While its AU$1,699 list price isn't for bargain hunters, the Minolta F100 delivers a lot for the investment. It's also worth shopping around, as we quickly found a couple of online outlets selling the F100 for at least AU$100 less than this list price.
Minolta Dimage F100
Company: Minolta Australia
Price: AU$1,699
Distributor: Hagemeyer
Phone: 1300 728 606
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