Minolta Dimage 2300

The Minolta Dimage 2300 is a great camera, I bought it for $2000 on eBay in Jan 2003. What a sweet deal. I use it all the time, even when I'm sleeping :-)) I took a picture of my sweet mama and it felt great!

I've had the camera for two days now, and I'm very impressed. It's very easy to start using and take pictures with, and the image quality is pretty good. The colour screen is easy to see, and shows a good representation of the image.

The few irritations I have are the following:

1. You have to close the lens cover to be able to view pictures---this slows down reviewing a picture.

2. The camera always comes on with the flash set to come on automatically. I would prefer the flash to be off by default (so there should be a setting for it).

3. You can't turn off the beep when you press buttons.

4. The battery cover also covers the compactflash card, and seems not very strong. It's also quite hard to slide it sideways to get it open, and hard to align it to close it.

But apart from that, it's a good bit of equipment. The images are high quality (if you hold the camera still...) and there are lots of different compression rates, so you can fit hundreds of lower quality images on a card or several high quality images. There is a really nice feature where you can preview an index of all the images on the card, and then view one in detail. This allows you to quickly find an image to preview.

If you buy the Minolta infra-red remote control, you can also take pictures remotely (instead of using the built-in 10 second timer). I haven't got one, because I can't work out where to buy one from, but it's a neat idea.

The camera takes very good pictures inside with the flash turned off, which is a battery saver. The viewfinder is also easy to see through as it's right at the edge of the camera, and therefore will go closer to your eye (as your nose is not in the way!).

I've not got Windows 98, so I can't use the supplied software, but I can easily read the pictures in Linux on my laptop using a compactflash to PCMCIA converter, which was very cheap.

Yup, very nice. I like it.