First shot off DZ3

[Wavshrdr]

James Bond 007 wrote:

I've asked Minolta about the horizontal lines a week ago. They still trying to figure out what to answer. :-(

It seems that not all cameras have this problem. The stripes in zoli223's picture are very faint. I met another user who had this problem, here's a 100% crop of one of his pics. Look for vertical lines, the picture is rotated.

http://www.csucsposta.hu/jbnd007/band.jpg

WOW, that is super obvious. My Z3 just arrived and I am waiting for the batteries to recharge so I can give it a go. I wasn't expecting it until tomorrow. Unfortunately heavy rain outdoors so outdoor shots won't be too bright.

FYI- my US model was silver so now all my Z2 accessories that were silver should blend right in.


Tim

[alder]

Tim: Your reasons for choosing the Z3 lie very close to my own. I also thought about the forthcoming Finepix s5500, since I lost a Finepix S602 in Germany last year. That was a great camera and I have lots of CF microdrives lying around, but the speed of the Z3 in achieving natural photos is THE big selling point for me. One also needs a fast SD card and it should be large to hold videos. The Kingmax 60x 1GB, which is sold almost exclusively by newegg seems to answer that issue best at present. As to auxiliary lenses, can anyone advise whether one should just use the Minolta official accessories or whether there's something out there which gives a greater "zoom range"?

My quandary is: WHICH Z3 to buy? Newegg and several "cheaper" suppliers list the manufacturer's number as 22570749, while top photo suppliers such as Adorama and B&H, along with less expensive suppliers (Digitalphotoclub.com @ $454 delivered, for instance) list the manufacturer's number as 2733-351. Since firmware is a critical issue in digital cameras, I'm concerned that these numbers may reflect two different firmware versions.

Does anyone have information on this aspect of buying a Z3?

[Clive Egginton]

Ok, I've got a follow-up to my posts about my concerns about the colour balance on the Z3. The picture that worried me most was microsaft's golfers shot - so I discussed it with KM. This is their response:

"Please see attached screen grabs. Using the DiMAGE Viewer you can check all
other images you may have taken with the camera. You will see from this
particular image that the camera records it being set to Text, Night
Portrait, Sunset. This means that the camera will have been set to capture
a warmer, low light scene and added image processing to deliver a rich
over-saturated image."

So we can all breathe a sigh of relief - the camera was doing what it was told after all.

None of my image editors can show the Exposure Program from the Exif data - they just come up with 'not defined' but the DiMage Viewer tells us more. There's more than one lesson to be learnt here.

Cheers,

Clive

PS. once again my apologies to Fredrik.

[insideabubble]

ANy updates on the lines thing from Minolta?

[macchina]

Hmm..no answer from minolta-support since 4 days (I sent 2 mails & 2 sample pics).

I use my pics for web and some prints (but not so often). So for me its not a really big problem.

The lines are only visible at 1:1 view,

Here a sample pic (original size):
http://web.utanet.at/siderite/PICT0391.JPG

Here is a crop with the lines:
http://web.utanet.at/siderite/lines_crop_4MP.jpg

And here is the pic resized (resampled) to 1024x768:
http://web.utanet.at/siderite/PICT0391_1024.jpg