Minolta raises the bar for digital cameras. Bloomberg Bootcamp, a Report on Today's Technology. No matter how much fun they are to take pictures with, the knock against digital cameras has been they still weren't able to compete with the print quality you can get from film. Especially with enlargements. But that won't be true for much longer. Minolta is coming out with the DiMage 7...

"This is true 5.24 megapixel so you can create 12 by 16 inch photo quality prints on an inkjet printer. And it creates a huge file, should you want to manipulate it later. It will put out a 14 meg file in a super fine mode."

Minolta's Mike Sonneberg. The camera's lens is equivalent to a 28 to 200 millimeter zoom on a 35 millimeter camera...

"And if you use the digital zoom, you can go from 28 millimeters to 400 millimeters without any attachments."

If you don't follow what all of this photographic mumbo jumbo means... you aren't likely to spring for this camera, even though its automatic mode makes it easy enough for anyone to use. The DiMage 7 will be on the market in July for about 15 hundred dollars. While there's a lot to like here, you could buy several pretty good 35 millimeter cameras for the same money. It's a steep price for going digital. And right off the bat... you'll need to buy a larger Compact Flash card for storing pictures. Minolta includes only a 16 megabyte card... enough for just one picture at the camera's highest resolution. That doesn't make much sense. Bloomberg Bootcamp, I'm Fred Fishkin.