DiMAGE A200

I was looking for a camera that would give me flexibility and good quality without too much bulk and weight. Pending a more thorough evaluation, here are a few observations on this prosumer camera available since December 2004 in the US.

Pros:

• I find the 28-200 mm equivalent lens versatile. The zoom is operated by turning a ring on the barrel: fast, accurate, and silent.
• The lens appears to be of good quality. The threaded barrel allows one to attach filters without increasing bulk with an adaptor, which is nice for hikers and climbers.
• The lens hood that comes with the camera can be reverse-mounted. This is convenient when carrying the camera in a compact case. (However, operating the zoom ring when the hood is reverse-mounted is not easy.)
• The A200 provides extensive control on metering, focusing, exposure mode, white balancing.
• The user interface is reasonably intuitive and well-designed.
• The anti-shake mechanism seems to work very well: I took a 0.5 s exposure freehand at 200 mm and could see no appreciable blur in the result. This was probably a lucky shot, but I'm impressed nonetheless.
• Battery life seems adequate for a day in the mountains. It's a good idea to carry a spare, though.

Cons:

• The user's manual warns about possible vignetting with polarizer filters at lengths below 50 mm. Indeed this happens with my Tiffen circular polarizer. A filter designed specifically for wide-angle lenses like the B+W slim circular polarizer (5mm casing, no front thread) significantly reduces, but does not eliminate the problem.
• In auto mode, white balancing is badly off in incandescent light. However, if the mode is set to tungsten the result improves dramatically. Given the kind of light one finds in the mountains, this is a minor blemish for me. On the other hand, automatic white balancing also produces a pronounced blue cast on snow in bright sunlight or in shaded areas. Once again, switching to the preset daylight or shadow modes fixes the problem. I haven't tried the custom white balancing yet.
• The A200 does not provide a panorama assist mode and no software to stitch together different frames is shipped with the camera. One can lock the exposure, but manual brightness adjustments during postprocessing are still required, and the assistance in framing consecutive shots so that they line up nicely is missing.
• One cannot shoot bracketed frames with the remote control. For exposure bracketing, this means that the photographer has to adjust exposure compensation manually in between shots. However, for white balance bracketing, there seems to be no easy workaround. In any case, one has to touch the camera, which is undesirable when shooting with a tripod.
• Images can be saved in raw format and in JPEG, but not in TIFF.
• The instructions manual lacks an index. The online English FAQ is poorly translated from the Japanese.
• Two emails I sent to tech support were never answered.