1   Introduction

Some days ago I bought a camera so that I could take some photos of my computer equippment and more. Before I bought this camera I have looked at the new 10x zoom cameras and especially on the Dimage Z1 form Minolta. The only thing that I did not like with the Z1 version was that it had some problems with purple finging. So I waited for the second version of this camera and so I bought the Konica Minolta Dimage Z2.

2   References

Steves Digicams have done a good review of this camera and its features so I skip that part and move forward to the things that I find important in my environment.

The official site for the Dimage Z2 camera show its specifications and also some sample images. These sample images actually show quite well how the camera performs. One thing that it do not mention is that it is not very good at focusing when it do now have good light condition. This is a bit annoying but it has a manual focus so it is not a very big problem.

3   Linux connectivity

One thing that I was a bit uncertain about with digital cameras was how it could be used in a Linux environment. I have an old installation of Windows 98 but I rarely use it and did not want to reboot the computer just to be able to connect the camera with my computer.

So how did this work? ... Well actually very good!

Here is what I added to the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1	/mnt/camera	vfat	noauto,user,rw	0	0

In order to add the correct modules into the kernel I have used the package 'usbmgr'. I installed it (earlier) using the debian command:

apt-get install usbmgr

Then I connected the camera to my computer and powered on the camera. And now a device appears in devfs:

ola@tigereye:~$ ls -l /dev/sda1
lr-xr-xr-x    1 root     root           34 2004-04-11 23:34 /dev/sda1 -> scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1

So it was just to mount it as any other device:

ola@tigereye:~$ mount /mnt/camera/
ola@tigereye:~$ ls /mnt/camera/dcim          
100km004

OBSERVE! It is very important that you unmount the device before you unplug the camera. I did the mistake and unplugged it, shot a couple of photos and then reconnected the camera and tried to copy the images. It was a mistake because no new images appeared and when I unknounted the camera device the new images was destroyed and also the card was messed up. So I had to reformat the card before I shot new pictues. So do not make the same mistake as I did.

4   Sample images

First I want to show the macro capabilities of this camera. This picture was taken a few centimeters from my keyboard. I had to move the camera away from the keyboard in so that the flash could be used. Otherwise the lens was in the way from the flash. I could have shot a picture without the flash but I decided not to because of the lack of light here in my office. You can see in the bottom left that the flashlight do not cover the entire image.

Next image is taken from the ground up in a tree using the excellent zoom capabilities of this camera. It show good color and also very good sharpness. The lighting conditions was very good so the autofocus worked very well.

This image show the ammount of purple fringing. To me it is very low. You can see very little of it on some of the branches, especially in the bright area. But you will only notice it if you zoom in to the image. I can not say that it is a problem.

This image show the color representation that this camera can give. It is taken a sunny day (the flowers was in the shadows from a house) with good ligh conditions.

When I did not sit in the drivers seat I checked if it was possible to shoot images though the window of the car. You can see that the results was quite good. You can of course see some reflexes from the window. The autofocus system was good enough to give good results even in high speed (90 km/h). I must admit though that about 1/3 images did not have that good quality.

I also used the ultra high speed shooting available on this camera but never found anything interesting to shoot at, so I shot at the same thing as above.