Konica-Minolta Dimage Z2

In march 2005 I bought a Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 camera, and, although there are some websites describing, there are still some things I would have liked to know about the camera before I bought it, so I decided to set up this site.

Links, etc

Konica Minolta, and the Dimage Z2 camera. This site has the manuals.
A second Konica Minolta site, that actually holds different info. Here the Dimage Z2 page doesn't have the manuals, but does have sample images/films.
An excellent megapixel.net review.

Secure Digital Memory speeds

The specs say that the camera can film 640x480 @ 30fps films, that last until the memory card memery runs out. But the specs also say the memory card needs to support writing data `fast enough' for this to work. Unfortunately, the specs nowhere mention how fast is `fast enough'. So, here is just one datapoint: When using a Dane Elec memory card of 1 gigabyte (the pdf clames write speeds of 3MB/s), I can make films of 12 minutes and 4 seconds. This is somewhat strange, as 1 gig is enough to film over 15 minutes, but the camera seems to stop at 12:04 (tried it four times, and each time filming stops at 12:04).

Filming 640x480@30fps blackness (with lense cap on lense), filming stops at 12:04, filesize=770015620 bytes (free space on SD card: 154Mbytes).
Filming my work-table at 640x480@30fps, sometimes moving camera: filming stops at 12:04, filesize=771963268 bytes (free space on SD card: 152M).
Filming my work-table at 320x240@30fps: filming stops at 22:00, filesize=815935364 (free space on SD card: 110Mbytes).
800x600@15fps, stops at 14:06, filesize=864331928 (free space on SD card: 64Mbytes)

So, for all tested filmtypes recording stops well before the card is full, contrary to what the manual claims.

Converting .mov to .mpg (for dvd players etc).

It can film, but it was somewhat difficult to convert the .mov generated by the Dimage Z2 (or I suppoze any other Dimage that can film) to .mpg files that play on my DVD player.

The Dimage Z2 generates audio with a samplerate of 7875 Hz, and unfortunately mplayer refuses to generate .mp2 compressed audio for that (.mp2 only accepts 16, 32, 44.1 kHz sample rates). mencoder does have resample options, but they don't seem to work. This complicates the conversion somewhat, and I had to use a three-stage process, using resample:

mplayer -novideo -ao pcm:file=audio.wav  pict0047.mov
resample -to 32000 audio.wav audio2.wav
mencoder -audiofile audio2.wav  -o pict0047.mpg -of mpeg -oac lavc  -ovc lavc \
  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vhq:vbitrate=3000:acodec=mp2:abitrate=128 \
  pict0047.mov

The first line generates an audio.wav file, with 7875Hz samplerate audio data. The second line converts the audio.wav to a 32kHz samplerate audio2.wav file. The third line then uses the audio2.wav together with the original video data in pict0047.mov to generate the pict0047.mpg that plays on my DVD player.

Remarks:

The above commands only work for 30fps films; Aparently the mpeg spec doesn't allow for 15fps films.
The vbitrate=3000 (last line) works reasonably for 640x480 30fps films, but you may want to experiment with different values (the higher the better and bigger the resulting file).
It should have been possible to generate 16kHz samplerate audio2.wav files, but both DVD players I tried (a hiteker HE-1900 and a panasonic) didn't properly play the resulting .mpg files. If you have a better DVD player, you may want to change the -f:16:2,32000 to -f:16:2,16000.
If the resampling isn't done, mplayer comes with a
Sampling rate 7875 is not allowed in mp2 Couldn't open codec mp2, br=128
error message.
mencode's commandline option syntax changed since 1.07, before the way to output the .wav was with "-ao pcm -aofile audio.wav".

Writing .mpg files to VCD (SVCD)

Using GNU VCDImager, and cdrecord (both packages from the debian testing distribution, around march 2005), I burn my SVCD's using:

vcdxgen  --iso-volume-label='test.cda' *.mpg
vcdxbuild --sector-2336 videocd.xml
cdrecord -v -dao blank=fast speed=12 dev=/dev/hdd -immed cuefile=videocd.cue

Officially the resulting CD isn't a SVCD, as they apparently don't support 640x480 resolutions, but both DVD players I tried do accept it.

Turning the .mov files into XVID

The following seems to work for me:

rm -f audio*.wav
mplayer -novideo -ao pcm:file=audio.wav  pict0047.mov
resample -to 44100 audio.wav audio2.wav
transcode  -a 0 -i pict0047.mov -w 900,50 -b 64,0,2 --a52_drc_off -R 1 -y xvid,null -o /dev/null --print_status 25
transcode  -a 0 -i pict0047.mov -p audio2.wav -w 900,50 -b 128,0,5,2 --a52_drc_off -R 2 -y xvid -o pict0047.avi --print_status 25

Transcode has a "-J resample" option, that sortof works, but the resulting audio is bad (and transcode segfaults on at least one .mov of mine), so I resorted again to the resample programme.