Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200Konica Minolta trims a little and adds a little relative to their top-end A2 model, delivering a strong contender in the 8-megapixel derby.<<Video, Power, Software :(Previous) | (Next): Reference: Datasheet>> Page 13:Test Results & ConclusionReview First Posted: 12/22/2004 |
Test Results
In keeping with my standard test policy, the comments given here summarize only my key findings. For a full commentary on each of the test images, see the Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200's sample pictures page.
Not sure which camera to buy? Let your eyes be the ultimate judge! Visit our Comparometer(tm) to compare images from the Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 with those from other cameras you may be considering. The proof is in the pictures, so let your own eyes decide which you like best!
As with all Imaging Resource product tests, I encourage you to let your own eyes be the judge of how well the camera performed. Explore the images on the pictures page, to see how the Konica Minolta A200's images compare to other cameras you may be considering.
- Color: Very accurate color, which means it's by default
a little dull-looking. Excellent ability to tweak color saturation to suit
your personal preferences though. Good white balance, but the Auto mode has
trouble with incandescent sources. The Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200's color
was very accurate, among the best I've seen on consumer/prosumer digital cameras.
That said though, "accurate" means "dull," relative to
most digital cameras on the market, which pump up the color saturation to
make their images look more appealing. The good news with the A200 though,
is you can have your color however you want it, since its very fine-grained
saturation control lets you tweak the color to exactly the level of brightness
you want. The camera's white balance system worked quite well in most situations,
but the auto white balance option had a hard time with the incandescent lighting
of my Indoor Portrait test. Fortunately, both the Incandescent and Manual
white balance settings did a good job with that light source. Bottom line,
color that you may want to tweak to suit your tastes, but an excellent ability
to do just that.
- Exposure: Average to a bit better than average exposure
accuracy. Excellent tone control. The A200 handled my test lighting quite
well, accurately exposing most shots, requiring about the usual amount of
exposure compensation on shots that usually need it. Its default contrast
is a little high, but its broad-range, fine-grained contrast adjustment led
to an excellent performance under the deliberately harsh lighting of the "Sunlit"
Portrait test. It did lose detail in the strongest highlights of the Far-Field
test shot, but the bright sun and clear air the day we shot that made it an
unusually tough test.
- Resolution/Sharpness: Very high resolution, 1,450 -
1,600 lines of "strong detail." The A200 performed very well
on the "laboratory" resolution test chart. Artifacts weren't present
in the test patterns until resolutions as high as 1,400 lines per picture
height horizontally, though some were present at about 800 lines vertically.
I found "strong detail" out to about 1,600 lines horizontally, but
artifacts and aliasing held the resolution to about 1,450 lines in the vertical
direction. "Extinction" of the target patterns didn't occur until
about 2,000 lines, but even there, a small distinction between the lines is
noticeable. Using its "MTF 50" numbers, which correlate best with
visual sharpness, Imatest showed an average uncorrected resolution of 1231
LW/PH, and a resolution of 1763 LW/PH when normalized to a standard 1-pixel
sharpening. These are very good results.
- Image Noise: Good noise performance at ISO 50-200, high noise
and lost detail at ISO 400 & 800. The Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200's
image noise was low at ISO 50, and quite acceptable at ISOs 100 and 200. Better
yet, loss of subtle detail to the anti-noise processing at ISOs of 200 and
below was relatively minor. At ISO 400, the loss of detail increased significantly,
as did the noise itself, and at ISO 800, the images were both much noisier
and much softer. The color balance also shifted somewhat at ISO 800, the noise
in the blue channel contributing to a slightly bluish cast. Nonetheless, ISO
800 images would probably be quite usable for 4x6 prints, possibly 5x7s.
- Closeups: A very small macro area with great detail.
Flash performs surprisingly well up close too. The Konica Minolta A200
performed very well in the macro category, capturing a minimum area of only
1.99 x 1.49 inches (50 x 38 millimeters). Resolution was very high, and a
lot of fine detail was visible in the dollar bill, coins, and brooch, though
details were softer on the coins and brooch due to the close shooting range.
Details softened toward the corners of the frame, but were fairly sharp on
the dollar bill. (Many digicams produce images with soft corners when shooting
in their Macro modes.) The A200's flash throttled down quite well for the
macro area, providing great coverage, if just slightly bright. - One thing
that helps with the lighting on close-in macro shots with the A200 is that
its macro mode works at a range of wide-angle focal lengths, but also at maximum
telephoto. The telephoto option gives you a lot more room to work with between
the lens and your subject.
- Night Shots: Good low-light performance, with reasonably
bright exposures at the darkest light level of this test, though warm color.
High image noise at the higher sensitivity settings. Excellent autofocus capability
and EVF usability at low light levels. The Konica Minolta A200 produced
clear, bright, usable images down to the 1/8 foot-candle (1.3 lux) light level
at the 100, 200, 400, and 800 ISO settings. I undershot the correct exposure
at 1/16 foot-candle, but the camera is clearly capable of working at that
light level. (I'll try to get back to this, reshoot the 1/16 fc images if
I can.) At ISO 50, images were bright down to the 1/4 foot-candle (2.7 lux)
light level, though the target was visible at the lowest light level of the
test. Color balance was a little warm, sometimes reddish, with the Auto white
balance setting, with increasing color casts as the light level decreased.
Noise was fairly low in most shots, though it increased to a very high level
at ISOs 400 and 800. The camera's Noise Reduction setting didn't seem to do
much in the way of controlling or decreasing image noise, though images taken
without Noise Reduction enabled do show more red pixels, and thus a stronger
red cast. The A200's autofocus system worked down to the 1/16 foot-candle
limit of our test, and its EVF remained usable at that light level as well.
(Fairly unusual for an EVF, in my experience.)
- Viewfinder Accuracy: Excellent accuracy from the EVF
and LCD monitor. The Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200's "electronic"
optical viewfinder (EVF) was very accurate, showing about 98 percent of the
final image area at wide angle, and about 99 percent at telephoto. The LCD
monitor also proved very accurate, since it's essentially the same view on
a larger screen. Given that I like LCD monitors to be as close to 100 percent
accuracy as possible, the A200's LCD monitor performed pretty well here, as
did the EVF.
- Optical Distortion: High barrel distortion at wide angle,
but low pincushion at telephoto. Low to moderate chromatic aberration, good
sharpness in the corners of the frame. Geometric distortion on the Konica
Minolta A200 was fairly high at the wide-angle end, where I measured approximately
1.04 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared quite a bit better,
as I found only 0.03 percent pincushion distortion there. Chromatic aberration
was very low at medium and long focal lengths, rising slightly at wide-angle.
(This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects
at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.) Sharpness in
the corners was very good (much better than average) at wide and medium focal
lengths, softening somewhat at the telephoto end of the lens's range. Overall,
a high-quality lens, with better than average performance across the board.
- Shutter Lag and Cycle Time: Very good shutter lag, average
cycle times. With shutter lag that ranged from 0.61 - 0.63 second in full
autofocus mode, and down to 0.097 second when "prefocused" (by half-pressing
and holding down the shutter button before the shot itself), the Konica Minolta
A200 is pretty quick on the draw, particularly for a long-zoom model. Shot
to shot it was only average, at 2.53 seconds between frames for up to 11 large/fine
JPEGs. RAW-mode speed is better than average at 5.23 seconds/frame, but the
buffer memory helps only slightly there. In continuous mode, cycle time is
very good, at 0.51 second for up to five frames, which translates to 1.96
frames/second. The buffer clears in 12-15 seconds when shooting large/fine
JPEGS to a Lexar 80x CF card. Times are all a fair bit slower than on the
A2, particularly RAW-mode cycle times. Also as on the A2 though, shooting
in RAW+JPEG mode is completely unbuffered, although the A200's cycle time
of 10.4 seoconds in this mode is quite a bit better than that of the A2. Overall,
a nicely responsive digicam, well-suited for the amateur sports shooter.
- Battery Life: Good to very good battery life. With a worst-case run time of 144 minutes (capture mode, rear LCD operating), and playback runtime of nearly 5.6 hours, the Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 shows good to very good battery life. Its performance is also helped by the fact that it can be set to go to sleep fairly quickly, and it awakens gracefully when it's time to shoot again. My standard recommendation that serious shooters purchase a second battery right along with the camera still holds, but run times on a single battery are still pretty good.
Conclusion
| Free Photo Lessons | |
|
Follow Imaging Resource: