So I impulse bought a camera lot recently in an online auction. Initially, I was really bidding on a standard zoom lens for my Canon DSLR, but there were a few other goodies that caught my eye. One such goodie was the Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3. A mighty 4MP bridge camera from 2004 sporting a real 12X Zoom and Anti-shake – in its time, this must have been an impressive camera.

Loading in some AA’s (4 of them), I was pleased to see it come to life… quickly flashing ‘no memory card’. After a lot of fiddling, I found in its original firmware, this thing was limited to either 512mb or 1GB. I only had a 16MB card (about 5 photos) and several 2GB cards. Fortunately with some web hunting, I found the one and only firmware update it received (which was a big thing in 2004 really) – This allows it to work with 2GB SD cards – Excellent! Successfully updated, I headed down to Devonport on Auckland North Shore for a walk and shoot.

Now, Im a fan of keeping old tech going in general – less to landfill and all that. I have also slowly come to realise that in the digital camera world, though we have progressed so far in technology around sensors, some of the old stuff really is still pretty usable for hobby grade life. Below 4MP is pretty creative stuff (I had a floppy disk camera set a few years back – less than 1MP), but 4MP up – it’s not terrible!…it’s viable. Are all these shots detail rich? – no… but they are not total blurred mess either. Creativity at junk prices can be had! The 35mm zoom equivalent of this thing is 35-420mm F2.8-F4.5 (ASA/ISO is 50-400)- thats a lot of zoom in a large coat pocket. The colour rendering is… nice. I didn’t do much editing at all in these images here – just a boarder, de-haze and for a couple a graduated filter as the sun was harsh and the sky was all over the show (as was the rain) today – old cameras do lack dynamic range for sure! (but so did slide film).

I went in with pretty low expectations.

“I’ll shoot a ‘roll’, pick a few images I like, write a blog post and find it a new custodian as I need to recoup costs and I’ll never touch it again”

Im now not sure I will let this one go just yet. It was a joy to shoot really – having the (very early) EVF and option to turn on to that by default was a pleasure. The camera is full of mode and setting options. The zoom range and all things considered quality of image at full zoom for such an old relic at 4MP really is fantastic. Now I need to make up my spend finances another way. It seems I always have a Minolta in the collection one way or another! (old school Minolta fan here)

These last three shots just show the range of this camera – ‘super macro’ – 1cm from subject. Full wide, and looking central to shot, full zoom (behind dirty glass windows for those two).