Minolta Dimage 7i

Print

Email

Bookmark

Share

Minolta's Dimage 7 made a big splash as the first of the 5-megapixel prosumer digicams. Its successor, the Dimage 7i, retains the original model's 5-megapixel resolution and 7X zoom lens and adds faster autofocus, shorter shutter lag, improvements to the LCD and electronic viewfinder, speedier continuous advance, and more. This is a camera for serious photo enthusiasts, and it has the feature set to prove it.

Design
Mostly because of its big lens, the Dimage 7i is a sizeable piece of machinery, measuring more than four inches in both width and depth, and weighing in at 652g with batteries and CompactFlash card installed. But despite its bulk, the camera actually fits in your hands quite well. Minolta placed the battery compartment on the left side, so the weight distribution is uneven, but that isn't a major problem because most users will shoot two-handed. Its dark-gray-and-silver body is mostly magnesium alloy and feels well made but definitely not up to the standard of a pro SLR.

Although the multifunction dials for adjusting both exposure compensation and white-balance settings are awkwardly placed on the camera's left side, most control placement is fairly efficient for advanced photography. The 7i's menu system is also logical and easy to use, and it is complemented by a flexible Quick Review mode, which instantly puts the camera in an almost fully functional playback mode. Simply depressing the shutter release halfway immediately returns the camera to record mode. Nice.

Features
The Dimage 7i's feature set is a mile long, and we can't think of anything important that Minolta forgot. Top billing goes to the camera's 7X zoom lens, which covers a 28mm to 200mm range in 35mm camera equivalent terms and sports both a zoom ring and a manual focus ring. The new Direct Manual Focus allows instant manual focus override after the autofocus system has locked on a subject. The lens will also accept 49mm screw-on accessories such as filters.

Among the Dimage 7i's extensive exposure and metering options are program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and manual exposure modes; three metering systems; five scene modes; autoexposure bracketing; and new on the 7i, a real-time histogram, a great feature that displays a graph of your scene's brightness values while you're composing the shot.

The camera has some special tricks up its sleeve, too, including continuous autofocus for moving subjects (not too common in fixed-lens digicams); the ability to set your autofocus target almost anywhere within the viewfinder; and a time-lapse movie mode. Several color modes and digital effects are available, and you can autobracket using a variety of image parameters.

You can mount certain external Minolta flashes on the camera's proprietary hotshoe if the built-in flash isn't powerful enough for you. All flashes can be used at any shutter speed, and the Dimage 7i supports Minolta's wireless TTL multiflash exposure control system, first introduced on the company's film cameras.

In addition to saving pictures as JPEGs (at three different compression levels) or uncompressed TIFFs, the Dimage 7i can also capture RAW files. You can convert the RAW files to RGB images--48-bit TIFF is one option--with Minolta's Dimage Viewer software. The program's RAW processing work flow features a comprehensive white-balance-adjustment function but only rudimentary curves and sharpening controls. The camera can also record up to 60 seconds of Motion JPEG video at 320x240 resolution, with or without sound.

Performance
For an advanced camera, the Dimage 7i performs well but not stunningly. Autofocus shutter lag is fairly short, and it's even shorter with manual focus. If you're shooting JPEGs, shot-to-shot time hovers at about 1.5 seconds, but if you're shooting RAW files, it jumps to 15 seconds--a serious disadvantage to using that format. You can shoot continuously at 2 frames per second (fps) for 6 frames before you must pause for about 4 seconds while the buffer clears. There's also an ultra-high-speed drive function that captures 1,280x960 shots at 7fps for up to 15 frames.

The manual zoom ring on the camera's lens is rough and feels like cheap plastic, but it's still more precise and easier to control than any power zoom control. Likewise, the manual focus ring, though a mushy servo-activated mechanism, permits reasonably precise continuous manual focus when used with the electronic viewfinder's focus magnification feature, which magnifies the center of the image by 4X. Autofocus speed, despite the advertised improvements over the original Dimage 7, is run-of-the-mill for this camera's class--a slight disappointment for the very AF-savvy Minolta.

The camera's 1.8-inch LCD is sharp and usable in bright light. Its electronic viewfinder (EVF) also displays among the sharpest, smoothest images we've seen yet from an EVF, though still falling far short of an optical SLR viewfinder. Both the EVF and the LCD show nearly 100 percent of the image captured.

Image Quality
Overall, the Dimage 7i's picture quality is good, but it's not without shortcomings. Thanks to its 5-megapixel CCD and sharp lens, the Dimage 7i can capture fine detail, and its color reproduction is vivid and reasonably accurate. We got a high percentage of good exposures and noticed relatively little color fringing around dark foreground objects. Unfortunately, moderately high levels of electronic noise reduced both the apparent sharpness of our test images and the smoothness of tone and color transitions. In short, the camera's images have enough detail for prints as large as 11x14 and perhaps beyond, but skillful use of Photoshop's noise-reduction functions will noticeably improve the quality of prints that large.

Interestingly, test images we shot at ISO 400 showed somewhat less noise than images from most small-sensor cameras. The 7i also has an ISO 800 setting, but the images it produces suffer from predictably severe noise--enough that many photographers simply won't use the setting.