Viewfinder (6.0)
The electronic viewfinder is not quite sharp enough to verify focus in shooting mode. In playback, it works much better, so part of the quality problem is the challenge of delivering a live image to an LCD screen. The listed specs for the display are 114,000 pixels, which is low for the purposes of a viewfinder.
LCD Screen (6.5)
Unfortunately, the LCD on the back of the DiMAGE Z6 is not any better than the viewfinder display. Konica Minolta says it's a 2-inch, 114,000-pixel LCD. Just like the viewfinder, the LCD doesn't perform well enough in shooting mode to show if the Z6 is really in focus. In manual focus mode, the center of the view is magnified, which helps some but still doesn't solve the problem. The LCD is clearly visible from only a narrow angle of view, which will be inconvenient for overhead or low-angle shots or for sharing images when more than one person is gathered around the screen.
Flash (7.5)
The DiMAGE Z6's pop-up flash is directly above the lens, which means that the shadows it casts will fall directly behind the subjects and won't show up in their pictures. That's ideal – the shadows cast by flashes can be distracting and ugly. Our examination of the camera showed that, with the lens set to wide angle, the flash worked well out to about 12 feet in small rooms with low, white ceilings, and that it provided enough light at the telephoto setting for shots up to about six to seven feet. Konica Minolta's website lists the flash's range as 0.7 to 11.8 feet in wide angle and 3.9 to 7.2 feet in telephoto mode, so our results are congruent with the company’s reported figures. It's important to note that our low, white ceiling is the best situation for the flash, because it reflects stray light back to the subject. Flash pictures outdoors, or in rooms with very high or very dark ceilings, take a bit more light.
The DiMAGE Z6 uses a pre-flash to measure flash exposure. The exposures we shot were pretty accurate, but the pre-flash adds a delay to shooting, and it uses up flash power. The Z6 also uses pre-flash metering with external flashes. Konica Minolta says the flash syncs at all shutter speeds, and that's how it performed in our tests, syncing just fine at 1/800 of a second – our scene didn't call for a 1/1000 second exposure.
In manual and partially automated modes, the DiMAGE Z6 offers a flash compensation control, allowing the flash output to be set two stops above or below the metered exposure, in 1/3-stop increments. Compensation is a useful feature for fill-flash and mixed lighting in general. It doesn't eliminate the pre-flash, though. It takes that reading, and adjusts up or down from it. It is not a manual flash power setting, which would also be nice to have.
Lens (8.5)
The 5.83—69.9mm f/2.8 – 4.5 zoom on the DiMAGE Z6 is labeled “APO” on the barrel. APO usually indicates extremely good color correction, but we had problems with the Z6's lens, noting color fringing both in wide angle and telephoto shots. Fringing often appears as a band of blue or red discoloration along the border between light and dark shapes in an image.
It's common for zoom lenses as long as this one to distort the image, particularly at the wide angle end of the range. At the wide angle setting, the Z6 lens showed barrel distortion, with lines bending away from the center of the image along the edges of the frame.
The lens offers a macro and a super macro setting. The macro setting simply allows closer focus throughout the zoom range. At wide angle, it focuses to about four inches, and at telephoto, it focuses to about four feet. At both focal lengths, the macro setting takes in a field of view about half the size of a page of the camera's instruction manual. In the super macro setting, the Z6 focuses close enough to fill the frame with an object about an inch and a half across. Konica Minolta says it's focusing at about 1 centimeter.
The Z6 differs from many of its competitors in its variation of image stabilization. Rather than moving elements within the lens, the Z6’s Anti-Shake mechanism shifts the CCD to compensate for motion. Practically, this will enable users to take telephoto shots at much slower shutter speeds and capture handheld shots with longer focal lengths. While the mode of implementation is different, we found the Z6 to perform similarly to competing cameras that employ more traditional forms of optical image stabilization.
As other systems do, the Z6 Anti-Shake mechanism offers two modes: one engages the system for just the exposure, while the other operates it constantly, to help with framing and focusing, as well as shooting the image. On the Z6, as with other cameras, the exposure-only mode is more effective than the always-on mode.
