It's incredibly slim, sharp and pretty,

It's a slender sliver of aluminum and stainless steel, serenading you with a tinkling tune at the press of a button. But the Minolta Dimage X ($399) is far more than a high-tech music box. It's a 2. 1 - megapixel digicam that packs a veritable suitcase full of features into a very small pocketful of camera.

The size of this camera-only 20mm, or about 3/4-inch thick-is central to the character of this camera. And we're not talking solely about cosmetics. Much of the engineering of the Dimage X was, in fact, dictated by the design. Consider:

The 37-111mrn (equivalent) zoom is, essentially, a periscopic reflex. The image enters through a front element located where you would expect a viewfinder window. A right angle prism then bounces the image through an internal vertical array of lens elements, onto the upward-facing CCD on the bottom of the camera. Zooming and focusing are all done internally, with no lens protrusion from the camera whatsoever,

0 To keep the number of lens elements down to a dull roar (nine), Minolta used three aspheric elements within the zoom.

0 Storage is on Secure Digital or Multimedia cards, the smallest current removable storage media. Maximum card capacity is thus limited to a 128MB SD card, although increased capacity cards are expected soon.

* The camera is powered by a dedicated lithium-ion rechargeable wafer battery measuring 3lx5lmm (the height and width of a large postage stamp).

You'll notice we didn't call the lens arrangement unique. One recent camera used a periscopic reflex arrangement-the Olympus Infinity Twin of the early '90s, a dual-focal-length point-and-shoot whose tele lens imaged through a path of reflex mirrors. Suffice it to say that the Dimage X's lens system is considerably more complex,

Alignment of such a tiny and busy optical system is obviously critical, and Minolta claims assembly precision of "submicron order"-that's under .001mm. There's another good reason to have the lens housed completely internally to keep it from the damaging whacks that mail camera zoom lenses typically suffer.

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