Konica Minolta DiMAGE Xg Digital Camera

I decided to purchase this camera because I had already bought one for my daughter whom found extremely easy to use. The second was for my mother in law in her 70's and she has found easy to use and hold.
It features are easy to follow and the pictures sharp and clear.

The DiMAGE Xg was produced midway through the life of the X-Series Digicams, before the Division was swalled up by Sony in 2006 - which is a bit ironic as the main financialy problems suffered by Konica Minolta in the US market was a class-action lawsuit by disgruntled customers at the failure of hundreds of camera caused by Faulty 4 & 5-megapixel CCDs - which were all down to poorly mounted CCD assemblies shipped by Sony-!!! At least Sony took ownership of the problem by buying the KM digicam division.

The Xg is a great little performer and can easily be held in a one-handed fashion, its 3.2 Megapixel CCD (not the affected CCDs types as above) so you're more likely to find a maturing X-Series camera that still working well years after higher megapixel camers have since died & gone to Landfill Heaven

It can sit in your shirt pocket and instantly spring to readiness (remember is has a folded-path lens that sits vertically in the camera body with a pentaprism at the top directing the light-path out through the lens aperture on the top-corner of the camera, which is covered by a sliding door when the camera is switched off. So it takes no time to ne ready for action - no churning of motors & cams like most slim digicams, who also can have flexible print stress fractures due to flexible circuits folding in & out every time the lens moves/powers up & down.

My only reservation with the Xg is that it doesn't have the external battery charging contacts on the bottom of the body, like the Xt, so batteries have to be extracted from the body to br charged.

Apart from that the Xg is a superb pocket camera with a real optical zoom viewfinder - so no more squinting at LCDs flooded by bright sunlight!

My strapline suggestion would be

Konica Minolta Xg - what are you wearing today?

It's a neat handy size, with some quality features, the video mode is exceptionally good,picking up sound extremely well, I loaned it to someone who took it to an indoor concert, I was amazed at the sound and movie reproduction, it was spot on, compared to other video clips I've seen.There is no macro mode, however, it takes great macro shots and is one of the strong points of the camera.The build of the camera is good, all metal. I found the optical viewfinder inaccurate, it was hard to get an even shot using the viewfinder, this was annoying ( but at least it does have an optical viewfinder, as well as the LCD screen, which I like to have as an option ).There is no manual control, but it does have four different IS0 settings, which gives you a little control, I'm still experimenting with this camera, which does show it has quite a few features which can be explored. Plus the four programme settings,portrait,landscape,and beach.In summary, it's a well built, pocket size camera which has some very useful features, forgot to mention, it comes with a rechargeable battery which has reasonably good battery life, keeping in mind I don't know how old the battery is as I bought the camera used. Anyway hope this helps someone out there.

Great little camera small compact easy to use I have one already but needed a camera for my daughter who was going on a school trip to france so I bought her this and it was brilliant.