Home > Consumer Reviews > Minolta DiMAGE Xi Digital Camera [3.2MP 3xOptical]

I bought the DiMAGE Xi for my Wife, prior to a Christmas trip to Austria. So far she has had little chance to use "my" camera. Chose the Minolta because it is one of the most compact available- easy to carry, so more likely it will get used.

Easy to use. after a quick initial scan of the manual I point and click and it works. Only downside so far is weak flash; turning it off and letting the camera adjust exposure often fixes that. Downloading to PC is easy, I just use Explorer to move files from the Camera to the C drive.

Buy at least a 64Mp memory card; holds about 60 fine-resolution shots, which look good at PC screen size. Battery lasted for all those 60 shots.

Digital advantages over film and using processing shops:

Being able to view pictures and re shoot as necessary. Preview on PC and print only what and when you want, with multiple copies to distribute (by email if you like). I think it will also prove cheaper in not paying for disappointing pictures.

I nearly bought a Canon Ixus V2 (seemed the 'expert' reviewers like it) but this (latest) model has only 2X optical zoom and the DiMAGE Xi 3X is useful. Digital zoom seems, to me, irrelevant, I use image processing for that.

Use image processing to adjust pictures (zoom, crop, etc.) and (very useful) being able to adjust brightness and contrast to 'recover' images shot in poor light. Incidentally, I recommend you try a free trial download of Adobe Photoshop, it's the best I have found so far...

I guess one day I might read the manual and get all sophisticated. But as an easy-to-use means of taking good quality pictures I really like the DiMAGE Xi - one of the best toys I ever bought.

This is a cracking little camera. It's my first digital and I was torn between this and the Canon Ixus V3, but my experiences with my Ixus II APS camera led me to try Minolta and I'm not disappointed. It is very easy to use and the picture quality is superb. The video capability is also very useful. I bought an additional 64meg card to go with the 16 meg card that came with the camera. I only have 2 gripes and neither are with the camera itself. Firstly the manual refers to pages that don't exist, although it is easy to follow and the camera controls themselves are quite intuitive. Secondly I have had to order a case separately, unlike the Canon. I think a case should be supplied considering the price of the camera. For these two reasons it is only worth four stars as a package but the camera itself is faultless.

There are now several compact digital cameras in a similar bracket to this one with respect to price/mega pixels/zoom etc., and reading various reviews online and in print shows them to be very similar. Many reviewers chose the Canon variants (including the Ixus range) as better but it was more important to me to have 3X optical zoom. Digital zoom you can do on a computer as another review of this camera already says! Compactness was also very important - I want this camera to use when I cannot be bothered to carry around my SLR, lenses, and filters. Obviously a digital SLR would be nice - but that's in the future! Sizing is great - I often now carry this camera in a pocket (waiting for pre-order of belt case), which means less missed opportunities.

Battery life depends very heavily on flash, zoom, and LCD usage (and not using super-fine mode TIF images of 9Mb each :) Generally a battery will do 40-60 shots varying indoor and outdoor making full use of zoom and always using the LCD. A spare is handy though.

The images on this camera are good for what they are - a compact 3X max. optical zoom digital camera. There can be slight colouring balance issues but the camera helpfully provides several modes to handle this (akin to using colour balance filters on an SLR). The flash seems quite powerful given the size of the camera so any macro style pictures (bad point - no macro mode on the camera itself) with flash can tend to look to white/glaring, but again the colour modes can help. Some reviews mention slight colouration (darkening) towards the outer corners of images, but I've only encountered this a few times and post-processing can generally clean this off. Indoor and outdoor shots are handled well, with and without flash. Longer tripod exposed shots are also possible and come out well given the price/features of the camera ...