it is a great cammera and takes videos and that can be very useful you will loooooooooooooooooove it! and it is also a great gift for anyone how loves photography or likses to video tape small events. it also looks great which is a major factor for some poeple who care more about the looks.

forcado6

Santa Maria, CA

This was my first SLR camera, overall it was enjoyable experience. This manual-focus 35mm camera is a simplified version of X700, with some features missing. It has an "automatic" mode, in which a photographer sets lens aperture, and the camera calculates the required exposure based on the built-in through-the-lens exposure meter, and sets it automatically, steplessly from 1/1000 to 4 s. In manual mode the photografer is free to set the exposure manually, in discrete steps from 1/1000 to 1 s, or however long he/she wants in "B" mode -- for example to expose correctly some detail in the picture, lit significantly different than average field. Exposure-lock button allows one to set exposure automatically based on the meter readings from an object of interest, fix that exposure and than recompose the image, getting the desired distinct from automatic field-average exposure. The camera lacks depth of field button, available on higher end models -- thus one has to rely on the DOF readings on the lenses; reading these makes preparations for the shot longer. It also lacks through-the-lens flash duration meter, present in X700 and X570. This latter feature was perhaps the only thing I was missing (that cannot be reproduced by workarounds, like other simplifications) -- yet automatic flashes (I used Vivitar 600 then) with their own meters produced ok results in most cases, and I was free to syncronize the flash at shutter speeds slower than 1/60, the blessing I constantly used (through the lens metering on dedicated flashes for X700 automatically sets the shutter speed to 1/60). The limitation of flash sync speed of (slow) 1/60s was perhaps the most important thing which made me to switch. This speed is 1/100s on older XE and XD lines of Minolta cameras; it really makes a difference when you use flash on fast-moving objects, or with hand-held telescopic lenses. The camera is mostly plastic, yet rather sturdy. Once I dropped it onto concrete from ~5ft and it survived that episode. Well, it landed on flash, which was smashed, however the damage for a camera itself and a lens was unbelievably negligible. All in all -- is this the best camera ever made? No way. Once front-end features of X700 are kidding in our days, compared to high-end DSLRs. Can one produce superb images with this camera, in a broad variety of conditions? By all means -- just play with it to get used, be creative sometimes, get some nice lenses... -- it easily blows away innumerable plastic point-and-shoots made decades later.

fotog

Chicago, IL