5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Digimax A7
Date of Review: Feb 28, 2006
The Bottom Line: For general usage, it is ok. For closeups or action shots, not great.
Well, the price was right so I bought it.
I have to say that I am not really getting the use out of it that I had expected, but I have unusual uses.
First, the camera is NOT user friendly. It took me 2 days to get a picture our of it. Not very intuitive controls. The manual is laborious to read. Finally I was able to get used to the format and can take pictures with ease.
The camera resets itself everytime you turn it off, so you have to push a lot of menu buttons to get back to where you like to be. You can save the camera settings and reload when you turn it on by messing around with the menu, but it seems it should just start up where you left off last time.
My main use is to shoot pictures at amateur hockey games. After a month of trying I realize now that the camera is simply not fast enough to do so well. The highest virtual ISO speed available is 400. At that speed, you simply can not zoom in for any telephoto shot inside a rink, as the aperture closes down with the zoom and you get nothing but black. With the zoom set at the widest aperture ("2.7"), the best speed available is 1/125. At that speed the photos are dim but recoverable with computer brightening software. BUT at 1/125 speed, perhaps 1/4 of the shots are too blurred due to the player speed.
My other use is to take macro pictures of things (electronic circuits on a bench). Here, the lack of a manual focus ability is really a problem. The camera focuses where it wants, and you have to hope your image is in focus. So far, it is not too accurate in focusing.
I think it would be fine for normal pictures, such as on a vacation, though.
