Auto Mode (6.5)
The DiMAGE X60 is a fully automatic camera that also offers 7 preset automatic shooting modes. The regular automatic shooting mode is indicated by a magenta camera icon in the upper left corner of the screen and each of the shooting modes is marked by a unique icon situated to the right of the camera icon. While the focus and exposure are automatically controlled, the DiMAGE X60 does allow users to control exposure compensation and white balance if they wish.
The DiMAGE X60’s EV adjustment works in all modes and adjusts exposure in 1/3 stops from 2 stops under the metered value to 2 stops over. White balance control is either available or locked out depending on the shooting mode and is adjustable by selecting from four presets.
In practice, the X60’s auto mode is reliable but not overly impressive. Auto focus was an issue indoors and in low light and will result in many unusable images. The auto white balance feature performed admirably in daylight, but again, under dim tungsten lights, accuracy waned.
Movie Mode (5.0)
The DiMAGE X60 records video at 320 x 240 at either 30 or 15 frames per second. The low resolution of 320 x 240 produces video that lacks much detail; 640 x 480 is required to produce high quality video files. The autofocus is fixed at the beginning of video capture, so if you move the camera around, focus will be lost. However, the digital zoom will remain active during video capture, and while not a preferred means of altering perspective, it does grant some level of flexibility.
Drive / Burst Mode (5.5)
The DiMAGE X60 is quoted by Konica Minolta as having a 1.6 frame per second burst speed. In practice, the camera was only able to achieve this rate under ideal lighting conditions. When shooting in low light or capturing fast moving objects, the camera was unable to properly expose or focus on subjects when using the burst mode. Additionally, exposure is set on the first image captured in a burst and then applied to each subsequent picture, which can result in improperly exposed images. The DiMAGE X60 has a six second flash recycle time, so forget about any sort of burst shooting if a flash is required.
Playback Mode (7.0)
The DiMAGE X60’s playback mode offers generally standard functionality. Pressing the Playback button calls up the most recent shot. Pressing the zoom rocker in the wide angle direction brings up the index display, which shows the last six shots taken. The four-way controller scrolls sequentially through all images in the camera's memory. Pressing the zoom rocker in the telephoto direction magnifies the image up to 6x, which isn't really enough to judge the sharpness of a 5 megapixel image. The index view can only display a maximum of six images on the screen.
The DiMAGE X60 includes a control to rotate images so vertical images can be properly oriented on the camera’s display. The orientation change is saved in the image file, so that it will display correctly the next time the camera is turned on. Pressing the Display button toggles between displaying information such as the date, time, file name, quality, and hiding all the aforementioned information.
The DiMAGE X60 offers a fairly basic slide show function that scrolls through the images stored in the camera’s memory. Users can control whether images dissolve from frame to frame or not; otherwise there are no other slide show options.
The camera provides two copy functions in the Playback mode that allow the user to zoom in on a image and save a new copy as well as copy a low resolution version of an image for sending via email. There is also an option to take a saved image and paste in a portion of a new image, cropped in one of nine preset shapes that include such options as a rectangle, thought bubble, and heart. These are fairly unique options that will provide users with a bit more in-camera flexibility once the shot has been recorded and free them from constant PC reliance.
Aside from crop and save functions, there are no editing features on the DiMAGE X60. To do any sort of basic editing of images a computer is required; however, Konica Minolta has included its useful Master Lite editing software (see Software section). Users also have the option of adding audio captions to images in the playback mode.
Custom Image Presets (4.0)
The DiMAGE X60 offers 7 preset shooting modes, four of which the camera can automatically select based upon shooting conditions. When the mode switch is set to Digital Subject Program they can be selected via the navigation buttons. The seven modes are: Portrait (zooms to telephoto to minimize depth of field and warms skin tones); Sports action (uses faster shutter speeds); Landscape (increases color saturation); Sunset (saturates red hues); Night portrait (uses longer shutter speeds); Text (boosts contrast to bring out black text); and Super Macro (fixes the lens at the 35mm equivalent focal length of 72mm and focuses as close as 2 inches).
The 7 preset offerings are a bit skimpy for an automatically-oriented imager. Some cameras currently exceed 30 options, which may be overkill, but the options are there for users to select from. With limited manual controls and fewer automatic options, the X60’s users are encouraged to just point-and-shoot.
