About
This as a petition for advanced firmware features for Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3. The Z3 is a very well made digital camera with some little problems. This petition has the target to make a collective feature request at Konica-Minolta.
Motivation
Everyone who uses a Z3 will notice the drawbacks of this camera. These are
After I bought my Z3 I found a firmware patch for the older Z2. With this patch the camera is able to save raw files. It inspiered me to look a little around in the Z3 firmware wih a hex viewer. I found some interesting things like some text "a:\%d.raw". Also I found that the firmware uses psos+ as operating system. Patching this will be quite difficult. It should be a compiled assembler code using stack for parameters of subroutines. It will take a lot of time an knowledge from my point of view. And you will get a lot of problems with minolta and there support center.
Looking at the firmware of the A200, also a stabilized camera, showed that it's also made with psos+. Seems they use the same source for both digicams! It should take Minolta a little time to add e.g. raw support. Talking to the second level support of minolta showed that they could support a collective feature request. So we setup this petition site.
What will we do
We set up this site to define a base for a internet online petition for features a Z3 could support. To reach this goal we ask the interested user for his private data and - more important - for his features he would support. The collected data will be collected and at the end given to minolta to make a decision on the feature request. This will be the first time that this will be done!
We have allready collected some features in the net that would be very nice, if we could get it. And the most features won't make a lot of work for minolta, we think.
The predefined features are:
The problem is that if you use jpeg as fileformat you have a little loss of image information. The camera has a high noise level. So any noise will take some information from the image. If you try to de-noise with noise ninja or NeatImage you will notice some little rectangles which are no noise and you can't eleminate without loss of details.
You have a higher color depth of 3x12 bit. With jpeg you can only use 3x8 bit. There are some images of the Z2 raw firmware patch available which shows a big difference to the jpeg images. The seems also to be a lot sharper. Look at here for raw versus jpg or here for raw on Z2 for more details
Here some examples from http://usuarios.lycos.es/mato34foto/dimagez2/raw/ejemplos.htm. Thanks to both authors. Judge yourself! Click on the image for full quality.
The most impressive thing is that the raw images are sharper than the jpeg images.
The manual focus slider starts a 10cm. The last usefull distance you can setup is about 2m. The next distance will be anything between 2m and endless. This focus isn't as useable as you like. Using the autofocus will sometimes also get some weired results. And it is also not very useable at analytic image setup. Here an example of the LCD display.
The problem with the manual focus shows up the next. How can you setup the focus to hyperfocal disance? Only with autofocus. Try a landscape nightshot with this. Could be made better.
If you make e.g. some portraits you should use a focal length of about 90mm (35mm film). To setup this will we very time consuming. How about displaying the focal length as a numeric value near by the focal length bar? Would take a little time to setup an analytical image.
And how about displaying the focal distance the autofocus got? I often had the problem the autofocus focus on the background 20m away while the pointed target was out of focus in a range of 3m. Displaying the focal distance would help to avoid such problems. Or a better autofocus would help too ;-)
How about to set the sensitivity of the zoom button? Or start with slow zoom and increase speed the longer you stay on the button?
One function key is nice, but often you could easily use some more buttons. More than one functions could be programmed on the custom button. First press cycles the function, OK selects it, then everything goes as it's now.
Now it's on you!!.
DiMAGE Z3, DiMAGE Z2, DiMAGE A200 are trademarks on Konika-Minolta Ltd,. Jp.
If you had questions or ideas please contact us via this thread this thread
or write to Sensovision on Webmaster Key Forums
Please also check this thread as inspire us to create this site and ask Konica-Minolta for changes to their firmware.
Last update: 14th of Jul 2005
