Reviews Written by Morven

Shame it's discontinued ...

Pros: Manual controls, color, flash performance, build quality

Cons: Discontinued, support perhaps shaky from Sony

I came late to the Minolta party, buying a 7D about a year after Minolta announced their exit from selling cameras. I got a brand new one that had probably been sitting around the store for that whole year and perhaps longer; it has a 2005 build date. For the $560 I paid, it's more camera than I could possibly expect.

The colors are wonderful; the controls - buttons and dials for almost everything, instead of menus - are excellent, and the results great. There's so much detail in the shots. Six megapixels is no longer top-flight, but it's plenty for what I shoot and what I shoot it for, which is for online and printing no larger than US Letter size.

The camera I've tried that was the closest to it, feel-wise, was the Nikon D200, and that's a much more expensive camera. It's got that level of 'serious' feel. ...