Interesting Look at Minolta A2

[Mathiau]

What is the ease of use for this camera? i am a semi newbie but havea good learning curve and want to get into some outdoor photography and am looking @ an A2.....

My past experience was a Dimage 5 of a friends i used often for over a year- currently only have a sony Sony DSC-p52.

[SmartWombat]

Well it's a tricky question to answer without knowing what you're going to use it for.

You could just put it in AUTO mode or P mode and let the autofocus, auto white balance, and auto exposure do it all for you. All you have to do is adjust the zoom and keep your subject in the viewfinder
The big thing for me is the image stabilizer built into the camera. Does the work of an expensive lens (that costs probably more than the camera!) on a digital SLR.

It's also got Aperture and Shutter priority modes at the tweak of a knob, really simple to start moving away from point & shoot to getting more control.

Manual focus is more of a problem, I can't do it quickly because the focus ring isn't connected to anything except the camera's computer. I had difficulty in getting it to focus precisely (rather than good enough) between 20m and 50m on the racetrack.

Still subjects, it's delivered some really good shots.
The sunglasses shot was taken from the top of the F1 pits in Catalunya this week.
Shot at 200mm with auto exposure, auto focus, stabilizer on, P exposure mode.
Then cropped to about 800x600 and resized to 640x480 for upload here.

Note: I use Digimarc watermarks to copyright mark the images.