You go to Costco for paper towels. You come home thinking about a camera. That is not a shopping trip, that is a trap, and I walked right into it.
Sitting there on the shelf was a Minolta, the MNZ6S, in a bundle with a 64 GB memory card. Six times optical zoom. And right there on the box, in big confident numbers, up to 72 megapixels. Seventy-two. Say it out loud and it sounds like a lot, because it is supposed to.
So I did what any reasonable person does in a warehouse full of bulk snacks and flat screen TVs. I turned it into a game. Price is Right rules. Lock in your guess before the reveal, then find out if you were high or low. (No peeking at the end of the video. I know you. I know what you are doing.)
Here is the question hiding under the game, and it is the only question that matters with a camera like this. How much of that 72 is real, and how much is software doing the heavy lifting after the fact? A number on a box is easy. A picture you actually like is harder, and the box never tells you which one you are buying.
Watch the clip, look at the test shots, and make your guess before the price shows up. Then tell me where you landed. High? Low? And more importantly, would you trust a 72 megapixel claim from a camera you found next to the rotisserie chicken?
The box can shout all it wants. The pictures are the ones that have to answer.
Leave a Reply