Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 Digital Camera

After ditching a large assortment of full-size Nikon gear -- several bodies, half a dozen lenses, etc. -- in favor of much lighter Pentax SLR equivalents, I was still frustrated by always having to schlep all that stuff around. No matter which lens or body I decided to leave behind on any particular outing, that's the one I needed, so I ended up packing it all, all the time.

So my advanced-amateur photo enthusiasm began to wane and after a year or three of abstinence, I started borrowing cameras from friends just to get the feel of what was new. After also getting started on digital with other cameras, I did some Internet research and discovered the A-200. More research always brought me back to that camera. What narrowed it down to the A-200 in the final pick was the wide-angle end of the lens. 28 – 200mm about covers what I ever need to do.

I've owned it for about a year now and I couldn't be happier. Sure there are some compromises to keep the price down. Like the plastic body and lens housing. Hey, I was used to that solid, precision feel of my old cameras, so this one felt kind of, well, cheap. But the upside is that the camera is nearly bullet-proof. The thin coatings on my former titanium and aluminum camera housings would scratch with the slightest encouragement; the A-200 does not.

I read in some of the reviews about the incredible complexity of this camera. NOT!! If you want a point-and-shoot, forget all the bells and whistles, set everything up to automatic and let the camera do the thinking for you. It doesn't get any simpler than that. But if you want extreme control and flexibility, the A-200 has got it down. The only deviation from default factory settings I would recommend to anyone wanting the "simple version" would be to set the focus on SPOT.

I've done some RAW shots, detailed them in PhotoShop and had them professionally printed. They are amazing. The fact that the camera does a JPG along with the RAW shot is a neat trick, too.

I recommend that anyone interested in this camera read the professional reviews out there, like the one at DPReview. Just pull up their Web site and type in Konca Minolta A-200. Reading all of these consumer reviews is of course usefull to some extent, but to get the whole picture, you need to hear it from a pro, too. The DPReview is very thorough and covers everything you could want to know. The reviews are unbiased, too, because I've read some scathing critiques in there.

Bottom line: The A-200 is a fine instrument wrapped in a very usable and user-friendly package. The results you get are directionally proportional to the capability of the photographer. It won't do what a DSLR will do (at the extreme ends of what the DSLR will do, but for probably 99.8% of the folks who would consider this type of camera, it will do it all just as well. And you need not schlep a bunch of lenses!