To start off, let me say that I'm a neophyte digital camera user, so my review will be based on someone with little experience.

That being said, the Z5 has been a pleasure to use. The ergonnomics are excellent, even for my big hands. The buttons are oriented very well for the left hand, so that you can virtually use this camera one-handed. Outdoor photos with good ambient light are very nice, and the 12x zoom makes it icing on the cake. The autofocus works very fast even on very distant objects. I didn't notice any excessive graininess or noise in outdoor photos, and the colors of the photos didn't look off to my eyes. However, if you shoot a moving subject, I found that it's wise to turn off the anti-shake, otherwise the picture will come out blurry, even if you manage to focus lock the subject (I tried this with flying birds).

The EVF viewer is okay, but not great. It's very grainy and there's a significant amount of lag. Because of this and the fact that the EVF momentarily blacks out while taking a pic, don't use it for moving subjects. In contrast, I found the 2" LCD screen to be very nice, with good contrast, brightness, refresh and resolution.

The main reason I knocked the camera down to 4 stars was its relatively poor indoor or low-light performance, with what seemed to me to be a weak flash. Even with longer exposure times and a tripod mount, I noticed a fair bit of noise in the pictures. And the flash, though rated out to 7' didn't seem to be enough to do the job, even on the slow flash. There was however no problem with redeye that I noticed.

What makes this camera truly awesome though (and a big reason I purchased it) is for its movie mode. Oddly, the movie mode seems to do better in low light situations than still photos. It does have some trouble focusing if you pan around too much or too fast, but otherwise, capturing video at 640x480@30fps with sound for as long as you have memory is great. And being able to zoom in this mode is a very nice feature, not to mention that the anti-shake feature works in this mode as well. The end result is SVHS quality video without too many shakes that looks really nice.

The battery life seems good to me, though I have little comparisons to make. It's also nice that the camera uses standard AA batteries so in a pinch, you can throw in some alkaline or lithium batteries.

I've gone with every version of the Sony Mavica for my digital pics over the years but with my son turning one I needed a camera that would get clear shots when he was moving fast.

The hardest thing to find was something that had a powerful optical zoom (Sony spoiled me with 16x), and tho I have two fine camcorders it is nice to have video recording that does zooms and stabilization during vid recording (again, Sony has always done zoom/stabilization in it's video capture but most cameras don't).

After much research and coming very close to buying the Panasonic Lumix (very nice camera but terrible viewscreen) and the Kodak (no stabilization and required to use that silly dock) I noticed the Z5 had a bigger viewscreen than the older Z3.

Looking closer and seeing the 12x optical and the video recording that not only does zoom and stabilization but also 640x480 at 30fps (Mavica does only 15 second 320x240) and the deal was done. I bought a 1GB SanDisk Ultra2 (60x) sd card which allows up to 350 highest res pictures (and/or up to 28 minutes of wonderful stutter-free video) and now I am taking shots of my little moving target with no more blurring results.

My wife isn't into tweaking any camera and the controls are great, a little more complicated than the Mavica but not by much. Really it's point & shoot ease with only having to know four other buttons (one to switch between playback and "record", the toggle to go back and forth between stored images, a dedicated delete button to get rid of ones you don't like and the shutter button. If you are into doing more then there's a lot more on the camera from macros to in-camera video editing and on and on.

I know that most people don't buy a still camera for video and so I have to stress that the stills are blowing me away ... but also mention that if you do care about the video option then consider that the reason I only gave the unit a 4 is that the videos are Quicktimes. If you're a Windows person then you'll have to pay Apple (the real monopolist of PCs) $30 for a copy of QuickTime Pro to convert them to AVI and then use Microsoft's free Media Encoder or the consumer-grade freebie "Windows Movie Maker" to convert the AVIs to WMV format for best viewing in Media Player or use the AVIs in Pinnacle Studio 9 to make DVDs (why the heck don't cameras just record to WMV? This Quicktime default is so old fashioned). The quality of the videos IS good enough for your DVDs.

Aside from the video conversion pain, as a still camera This is the one.

I have an old Olympus 2.1 megapixel C-2100. It had a built in stabilization just like this Minolta Z5. Unfortunately, the built-in stabilizer option is about the only plus I can find for this Minolta.

My pictures that I take using my 2.1 megapixel Olympus are night and day more vibrant in color than the ones taken with the Minolta.

We are returning this camera to get our money back. We were excited about the stabilization feature, as it is a hard feature to find in a camera, but if it sacrifices picture quality, then it is not worth it.

I have taken literally thousands of pictures with my Dimage Z1. I was very excited about getting the Z5. I thought the anit-shake technology and extra zoom would make this an amazing camera. Unfortunately this camera is HORRIBLE compared to the Z1. Here is why:
1. I used the 400 ISO setting quite often on the Z1 with great results. The 320 ISO setting on the Z5 is completely unusable unless you want pictures that look like they were taken with a first generation digital camera.
2. The pictures are not even close to as clean and clear. The colors are muted and I can not seem to set the camera to get anything close to white. None of this was a problem with the Z1. I frantically looked around for my receipt to return this (not from amazon.com) but I cannot find it. I am stuck with a very expensive but nearly useless camera.

The only reason I gave this 2 stars is for the anti-shake feature. This works quite well. I suppose I could use the 100 ISO setting, but I still do not get great colors.

Please keep this in mind...I seriously took thousands upon thousands of pictures with the Z1. I am actually quite heartbroken about this. I own a ton of Minolta products and this if the first time I have been let down. I guess I can let the kids use this camera. It is not much use to me.

Please find another camera. I am not a frequent review writer but I feel so strongly about this that I want to warn others.

I hope I have saved someone the $$$$.

I do not really understand the gripes I have heard about the color. With minor adjustments,I have been able to get great pictures with this camera. Try using a tripod and slower shutter speeds. Ergonomic and user friendly. I do not like the mode selection switch, though.

Having used this camera for a couple of weeks to take around 400 pics, I can see where some of the gripes about it have come from, but I'd have to say they are a bit overblown. Overall it is an excellent unit given the cost. I purchased the Z5 so I could get 3 things. Big Zoom, decent video capture, and a manual mode.

Pluses: Amazing Zoom, Effective anti-shake function, Very quick response time, 30fps 640x480 video WITH zoom and anti-shake, Easy/comfortable to hold, Nice screen, Electronic Viewfinder, Lots of other neat features.

Minuses: Odd lenscap, Slow USB commectivity (I believe full speed, not high speed, so buy a card reader), High Noise in some images -- This is the biggest issue, and it is most noticable at higher ISO settings. If you use the "AUTO" mode, the camera changes the ISO setting dynamically between 50 and 160. It seems to me that the vast majority of pictures I've taken in "AUTO" are at 160. I am perfectly comfortable using the program mode which lets me fix the ISO at 100. (I grew up with manual cameras-- a Minolta SRT-201 and a Nikon FM, so giving too much control to the camera scares me.) Anywho... fixing the ISO to 100 (or better yet 50) gives good images. Using the flash for low light portraits is a must to get good images in either program or "AUTO". Overall properly taken pictures have a "very good" image quality. The step up to get "excellent" with pure digital IMHO is moving into the true SLR price bracket about 3 times what this camera costs. Things might be different if an alternate image format was avaliable on the Z5. I'd like to see what native TIFF or raw images look like.

The video is impressive. I'd say image quality is on par with my 5yo Sony Hi8 Camcorder. It is slower to focus, and exposure adjustment can be a bit noticable, but it fits my need for video about 90% of the time. Most of the video I do is just a minute or two... Kid(s) opening presents, doing something cute, etc. Since I can fit almost 20 min of video on a 1GB SD card (or 350+ pics at the highest res/quality) I can do a busy vacation day on one card (tho I have a spare) YMMV with storage, I'd also reccomend high speed SD cards to get stutter free video.

Quicktime 7 pro (yes it records in quicktime) lets you convert from the native compression format to H.264, which provides impressive quality at a much smaller file size. Perfect for emailing or posting on the web. Unfortunately You have to pop for the 30 bucks to Apple to get the pro functionality.

The Zoom with the anti-shake is excellent. I've taken many handheld shots at full zoom, but this of course works best in daylight. The images are generally sharp and clean even hand held. YMMV of course. The zoom works well with the video mode, and the antishake is apparent, as panning and movement looks fairly smooth instead of my usual jerky motions ;).

Overall I'm very happy with this camera. I rated it 4 stars instead of 5 because of the ISO/Noise issue. There is more noise than there should be, but overall image quality is still very good.

As I took this out of the box and powered it up I immediately saw that it suffered from faulty programming. It was locked into the viewfinder mode and would not allow me to see anything through the LCD. Konica Minolta was of no help and simply said I should send it to them for repair - about a four week process for something that I had never used. Intuition told me that there should be some way to reboot the thing - but it was not to be. I bought this despite similar complaints that I had read on the web (one correspondent told of a vacation to Mexico being ruined by the inability to take pictures when this camera locked up). Well, they were right and I was wrong, so I returned it to Amazon.com without any problems and bought a Panasonic LZ2 which seems to be a good compromise between enhanced zoom and size. I will be taking that to Europe soon along with my old Fuji 2 megapixel as backup.

I bought this camera for my 10 year old son. Yes, a 10 year old as he had proved himself with his ability to shoot and care for a camera with a 2 megpixel Canon powershot. He got frustrated however when he began to learn to print and his pictures of course never looked as good as on his LCD playback. Our next step to teach him the value of cropping, using different functions and becoming more camera experienced was to increase processing speed and give more megapixels. We were overwhelmed by all the positive reviews of the Z5 from not only number one from Macworld and other computer and digital camera magazines but the expert recomendation from our camera sales person, in a family owned camera store in business for over 50 years and the sales people all own incredible amounts of cameras, most part time pro shooters, and they test personally every camera that enters the store. I am from a family of Canon LOVERS and would not give my Canon 10D SLR up for anything but the 20D. In teaching my son this camera I found it to be an excellant camera and the macro modes were great. The reviews I read fom the people here on amazon seem to be expecting the quality and funcitioning of a much more expensive camera not a $500, 5 megapixel. That is what we spent and I see on sale now so a great deal. In terms of low light my son did better than I did at times inside the Monterey Aquarium where no flash is allowed. I was truly impressesed with this camera and thought it would be fun to have for a second camera, easy to carry, and yet the budget is going towards the 20D. I was abosolutely amazed at the negativity over the camera in the reviews. If you want a video camera, buy a video camera. Someone had to stand up for this camera and it is great for ITS CLASS. Personally I would never consider buying a camera that ran from AA batteries, rechargeable or not. Lithium only for me and only use a flash atachment, never the flash with the camera. The truth is according to my expert who recomended this for our needs, there is no best camera of a certain class. It always depends on the type of photographer you are. A landscape photographer will hate the camera a portrait shooter will love. Ask not what is the best camera, go to a good store where people know somethng, tell them how and when you shoot and then come back to amazon and buy what you have talked to a knowlegable person about and have held and tried. Find a case, see how easy you can get it out, try some shots, a good store will always allow and encourage this. I can never, ever imagine buying a camera I have not held nor tried. For those unhappy, step up to the SLR land and then you will be happy. Then you can make the camera be the one that fits your type of shooting. This is a great all around camera in this class. I have also shot the new Canon 5 megapixel powershot and this much better and that for me to say is sacra-religous in my family. Have fun wih the camera and make sure you keep in mind that any pro will tell you if you take a role of 36 in the film days, you are lucky if you get two or three great shots. I know I cherish my garbage can and most will tell you I am a great photographer. Helps if they only see your best!

I've had several digitals before and this one is not as user friendly as i'd hoped. The manual makes assumptions that you understand their technical jargon without explanations. I have not encountered this with my other cameras.

Just what I have been looking for. Very pleased with the camera

This camera is Great!! Takes quality pictures up close and from far away. Good for amateurs and/or people like me who like to test drive before reading the instructions. Set it to auto and never worry about the lighting. Also, you don't have to fiddle with buttons to turn the flash on, just pop it open and you're ready to go. Finally, the anti-shake feature really makes this camera even more worth it.

I have had other super zoom cameras from other brands. I kept this Z5 for 3 months only primarily for one reason: Noise

In case you don't know what noise in photography means, it looks like random sand grain on a low-light photo. Konica Minolta Z5 is very very bad in terms of noise. Don't expect you can take anything decent with Z5 under in-door scenario without flash.

Other features work fine, such as the anti-shake feature and long battery life (due to AA sized battery). However, the ultimate outcome of a camera is the image. If the image quality is bad (mentioned above), other nice features seem insignificant.

Having owned only a Fujifilm Finepix A200 before this and being all of sixteen years old, I consider myself to be an amateur in the professional camera field; however, I have had this camera for almost four months now, and I have noticed some shortcomings.
For months, I had been eyeing the Canon S2 IS. I had done extensive online research, and that seemed to be the best camera in the field: it was definitely an improvement from my old camera (which was a PHD camera: Push Here, Dummy), yet at the same time was not so complicated that I, the amateur, would not know what to do with it. I waited with bated breath on Christmas Eve, hoping for the camera of my dreams and fearing that it would prove too expensive for my parents to afford (as it turned out, my father had rallied all twenty or so of my aunts, uncles and such and had collected a contribution from each of them; that camera was the reason I got no other gifts that year). When the time came, I reverently opened an appropriately-shaped box with my name on it, hoping against hope...and all of my expectations came crashing out the sky, trailing smoke, as I saw something that, while still a camera, was definitely not the Canon S2 IS of my dreams. The first thought that ran through my disappointed brain was, "Oh, no! Dad's gone and gotten some crappy Japanese look-alike!"
The Dimage Z5, obviously, is neither crappy nor a look-alike; it does, however, lack a fold-out screen, which is not a great loss, but there have been numerous times when that nifty little feature would have come in handy. It works beautifully in bright sunlight, and the colors are perfect; however, it has trouble focusing when I zoom all the way out to 12x, requiring me to set up my tripod for want of a steady hand, and when I use the zoom under dimly-lit conditions it cannot focus at all. Having had no experience with other brands and types, I cannot say whether this tendency is a shortcoming or not, but I suspect that it is.
One of the reviews I have read mentioned a lack of explanation concerning technical jargon. I find that I must agree on this point ("What on earth does 'telephoto' mean??"). While paging through the included instruction manual, I was frequently forced to ask my father what some term or other meant and which feature did what. But this lack is not serious.
I must admit that I love almost everything about this camera. I am planning to be a professional photographer someday, and this camera seems a good place to start. I am disappointed, however, that there seems to be no fisheye lens available for this model. And, relevant or not, I feel that I have to include the following:
My father paid almost $500 for the Dimage Z5 a little over four months ago.
Currently, the Dimage Z6, a newer model, is going for about $250, and the Z5 is not even available straight from Amazon.

Go get yourself a Z6.

I like this Camera for its ease of use. Good for amatures and for people like me who likes photography as a hobby. It does kind of short when it comes to some picture quality( just a little bit). but dont get me wrong! the photos are great, colors are lively ! but compare to DSLR- Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras with interchageable lenses this camera (Z5) is a little bit short in photo quality. If you're more of a Pro-hobbyist in photography this camera is not for you, better go for Nikon D50 or Canon Rebel XT. But for now, My DImage Z5 is all I need. The picture quality is close to my Nikon N6006 SLR Film Camera. It out performs my Nikon Coolpix 775, HP Photosmart E317 5.0 MPixels & Vivitar 3.0 MP. Im kind of a little bit dissapointed because after a few months that I bought it the newer Model Z6 arrives with the same price tag. The Z5 has a better VGA Video ( 640 X 480 @ 15 or 30 fps) than the Z6 ( 320 x 240 @ 15 or 30 fps.)only. This is also one of the reason why I bought the Z5, because of its video. There's a lot of times that we want also to take video of let us say Family gatherings and we dont want to carry that bulky camcorder, well this is the solution to it. Oh by the way Z5 has 12X Optical zoom & 4X Digital zoom, If we compare the range with the 'old-fashioned' 35mm camera it has a range of 35 - 420mm. With this kind of zooming power who needs an interchageable lenses ! and with my added telephoto lens my Z5's zooming power is more than 12X ( 420 mm ) and with anti shake system this camera is awesome !
Z5 is a great Camera and Im enjoying it so far and I recently using it with the Wide angle and telephoto lenses : )

I bought the Dimage Z5 a few months ago as a portable backup to my Rebel XT for $199 from B&H photo. The idea was to take it to outdoor sporting events so I could zoom in on the action. Unfortunately, it never actually made it to the ballpark. While putting it through its paces during some outdoor festivals and backyard BBQ's, the pictures it took were not what I expected. Understand, I was not expecting the performace that I get from my SLR, in fact I would be quite angry if a compact camera could give me those kinds of images. I also was not expecting the noise problem that I had with virtually every shot.

For those of you who understand cameraspeak, I was shooting at ISO 50, in broad daylight and an aperture of f/6.3 and f/7.1, with shutter speeds of 1/250 sec and above. The sun was shining. There should be zero noise under those parameters. However, there was noise in almost every single shot I took. This was also under the "hard sharpening" setting. It was completely unacceptable. Further, shooting indoors with this camera from a distance of greater than 3 or 4 feet is a joke. The flash is extraordinarily weak. It does have a hot shoe for an external flash, but that defeats the whole purpose for having a compact camera. If I want to use an external flash, I'll pull out the Rebel XT. Minolta decided to downgrade the flash to try and spur sales of their external flashes, it was a business decision on their part. Since they are out of the camera business, it apparantly wasn't a very good one.

I can vouch for the heat problems of the camera when shooting a movie with IS on. I had shot maybe 100 pictures at the 4th of July parade, and then took a 3 minute movie at the best specs. The camera overheated and shut down.

There are some positives to this camera. The handling/ergonomics are very good. It may look a bit strange, but people will notice your camera and comment on it, usually in a positive manner. The colors are a bit understated, but since I am used to a dSLR, I considered that a good thing. But I can't accept a near useless flash, and I draw the line at noisy images in broad daylight. I sold it (and had to take a slight loss even buying it at $199), and bought a Canon S2 IS. That camera is superior in every respect, especially in the most important one - taking pictures. The image quality is light years better. I've also heard good things about Sony superzooms, but have never actually used them.

It all comes down to this - you get what you pay for. Do yourself a favor. Go get an S2/S3 IS, or a Sony H1/H2/H5. Your pictures will thank you.

I bought the Dimage Z5 after holding and trying the Canon S2IS, a Kodak, Sony, and a Lumix. I liked it. I still do. Previously, I used Canon and Nikon 35mm and APS cameras. I still have them, and meant to still suse them. But the Z5 was so good, and so convenient, I rarely am even tempted to go back to the film. The sharpness and colors are unbelievably good. It is hard to understand those who feel otherwise, unless there are major variations.

There are a few weak spots. The viewfinder is not as sharp as I would like, but since I can retake the picture quickly, it is not terribly serious. On a few occasions, trying to take closeups, the auto focus has trouble. The menus are a bit obscure at times, but there is a whole lot there. Mostly, the automatic feature is so good that I use it most of the time. I have made enlagements up to 8 x 10 and the sharpness compares very well with my best quality Canon and Nikon 35mm lenses.

Too bad the company stopped making cameras. My first and last from Konica or Minolta.

After taking about six shots the camarea developed a black area on the right side of the image. I purchased a Canon XT made in Japan not China. I live in Toronto Canada and the camera was shipped surface using United Postal Services (UPS) they charged me CND $44.00 in brokerage fees, this was on top of the $29.00 I paid for shipping (this was refunded) and I also incured CND $22.00 for return shipping. I still have to figure out how to get the GST and PST returned.

I did receive a prompt refund on returning the camera. Be aware of the costs when purchasing on line outside Canada. I was told that there would be no brokerage costs if the item had been shipped by air.