This is perhaps a familiar story to photographers over the age of 40. I started taking pictures in the pre-digital era. The first camera that was my own was a Canon Snappy 20* – a delight of 1980s industrial design in bright red and grey plastic. I loved that camera, I took it everywhere. Later …
Minolta Dynax 9 – The 24 Year Wait for a Camera I had Put to the Back of my Mind Read More
This is a review of the Minolta 9000, the first professional autofocus camera. Back in the 60s and 70s the pro camera market was dominated by Nikon with their ‘bullet-proof’ F2 SLR camera. Canon made some inroads into this top-end professional market with their ‘F1’. Minolta bodies were used by some pros as ‘workhorse’ cameras, …
Minolta 9000 – The First Professional Autofocus Camera. Let it bleed. Read More
In clearing out my late father’s stuff, I came across quite a few cameras. Dad was an instrument maker and specialized in optics. He used to buy up cameras out of ‘bargain bins’ and try to bring them back to life. One of the cameras I came across was a Minolta X-300. I’ve owned quite …
Ah nostalgia, it’s a strange thing and forms a part of every one’s life and the older one gets the more the past seems so rose tinted. My first Digital SLR was a Konica Minolta 7D, bought in 2005 and which I had almost forgotten, but a click here and there lead me to DPReview and the KM Talk Forum, then a thought formed in my mind; why not buy one and use it today?
In 1973, the year of the Minolta XM’s launch, Minolta had been serving the consumer market very successfully for several years with the SR-T . There, it was a hard-to-beat queen. In total, about 3.6 million cameras of the SR-T series were sold. The SR-T was a cash cow for Minolta. Despite different versions and further developments, it was basically always the same camera. virtues of extreme robustness, high reliability and simple operation, were important to millions of photographers. No matter what the condition, an SR-T can almost always be triggered, and reliably. It and the outstanding Rokkor lenses were the basis for the success of the Minolta brand, which lasted for a good three decades. Why did Minolta dare to take the risk of entering the pro camp with the XM in 1973?
