Don't buy the camera, it is junk.
Based on my experience with the first version of the Mini, which was an
excellent camera, the Mini II is a big, big dissappointment.
The first version of the Mini took great, I mean surprisingly great high quality
still images for a simple point and shoot, even compared to my digital SLR.
It had very good endurance on my AA rechargable NiMH batteries. It had
all kinds of controllability in it's various menus as far as exposure control,
selecting the ISO, and color balance. Picture quality, both in the water and on
land was so good that I could take it around with me as my regular tourist
camera and leave my SLR behind much of the time. And, taking the pictures off
it was a snap with a standard USB cable cord as I could plug it directly into my
laptop and transfer directly. It even had motion picture video, granted only
320 x 240, but it was good enough for underwater where visibilities would
more often be the limiting factor than imager resolution, and if you played
it at 200% display size in your Media player, it wasn't half bad. It even had
built in audio recording as well.
But I think Sea Life really tripped, stumbled, and threw up down the front of
their shirt on this Mini II version....
No 1 - the battery endurance is atrociously short with the new AAA battery
format. Starting with the Duracell Ultras, they claim it will take 100 to 500
pictures on the batteries, but I've gotten about a dozen, and a few minutes of
video before the batts konk out. If you wait a few minutes, it will revive again
for a minute or two but then die in the middle of another picture. When I use
rechargeable NiMH or Lithium batts, it runs for about 6 minutes before dying out.
No 2 - gone are the menus that allow you to control the ISO, color balance, and
exposure compensations. They are replaced by a bunch of useless features, like
Beep Control, Display Icons, and Sleep time.
I used to set the color balance on my old Mini to standard sun and correct
them later in my video editor, but now I'm stuck with the continuous psychodelic
color changes forced on me by the always active automatic color balance of the Mini
II. Every time you redirect the camera at a new target the overall hue of the
picture changes from green tinged to blue tinged to yellow, then red, and is
constantly shifting....it is so annoying.
No 3 - There is No Direct Way to transfer your picures off the camera onto your
PC anymore!!!!.... What the Hell were they Thinking!!!! Now you've got to use this
cheap assed special card reader which plugs into your PC USB. Every time you
need to x-fer a load of pictures, you've got to open the camera, tease out the
memory card, stick it in this chincy quality card reader (something else to either
break or get lost on a trip), plug THAT into your PC, and then do the copy/paste
thing.
With my old original Mini, I could plug a standard cable into a USB cable port
right in the side of the camera and boom, it was done!
And No 4 - and most important of all; the picture quality is just plain TERRIBLE!!
True, image size was increased from 6 Mpixel to 9 Mpixel, but the increase in
size is totally lost by the absolutely atrocious lack of image clarity and bleachy
color fields. The old original Mini took images rivaling my digital SLR in many
circumstances, but the new Mini II had such apallingly bad focus and picture
wash out, that it wasn't worth the huge file size of a 3472 x 2604 pixel image
to store it, it was more suited to a 720 x 480, and by all rights could have been
reduced to that size, for all it was worth.
The motion picture video capabilities of the Mini II were increased to 640 x 480,
over the original Mini's 320 x 240, but you can barely tell from watching it. There
is so much compression and lack of detail resolution, that just like with the still
imagery, the increase in scan lines is just a waste of storage space on your SD card....
you get a larger version of the same crappy image, but now it fills up your hard drive
faster, at least until you can run it through a reducer.
In short, I walked into getting the Mini II with high hopes, after losing my original
Mini overboard on a boat dive. But having used it so far, I'm so sorely dissappointed,
and all I want is my original Mini back. Those of you still using the original Mini and
considering an upgrade - Don't do it. Everyone Else, steer clear. One look at the
pictures and you'll be regretting the buy.