Minolta (Chiyoda Kogaku) camera company
This is a Minolta 35 Model IIB, a 35mm rangefinder camera produced by Chiyoda Kōgaku in Tokyo, Japan in 1958. The Model IIB was the last model in the Minolta 35 series of interchangeable lens rangefinder cameras, dating back to the original model from 1947. Despite being Minolta’s last hurrah…
This is a Minolta V3, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko K.K. starting in September 1960. The Minolta V3 was the follow up to the earlier Minolta V2 from 1958, expanding the top shutter speed to a record high 1/3000 with the clever use of its Optiper-Citizen-HS…
In the early days of still photography, the idea of a variable focal length lens was fantasy. Since the dawn of photography, lens designers, engineers, and mathematicians worked at calculating optical formulas to correct for astigmatism, coma, spherical aberrations, and a vast number of other optical anomalies in lenses of…
This is a Minolta SR-2, a 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera produced by Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko K.K. in 1958. The Minolta SR-2 was the very first SLR released by Chiyoda Kogaku, launching an era of highly successful SR-mount SLRs that would last through the 1980s. Despite being the first ever…
This is a Freedom Zoom 105i, a 35mm point and shoot camera, made by Minolta starting in 1990. The same exact camera was also sold overseas as the Minolta Riva Zoom 105i but otherwise the cameras are identical. Featuring a unique shape that sorta resembles a cross between an alarm…
This is a Minolta X-700, a 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera made by Minolta of Japan between the years 1981 and 1999. It was the last advanced manual focus Minolta SLR before the auto focus area and had a large number of features including both Aperture Priority and Programmed Auto…
This is a Minolta-ER, a 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera produced by Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko K.K. in 1962. The Minolta-ER was a milestone camera as it was the first Minolta SLR with automatic exposure and was also the company’s first and only leaf shutter SLR. It offered shutter priority automatic…
For the second episode in a row, we take a deep dive into a singular brand of cameras, and as you can pretty much already guess, Episode 36 is all about Minolta! The guys and I visit the Minolta Disco with returning callers, Alex Luyckx, Bill Smith, Howard Sandler, Mark…
This is a Minolta Vectis S-1, one of only two Single Lens Reflex models developed by Minolta for use with the Advanced Photo System (APS) film format. The camera was made in Malaysia starting in 1996 and was a full system camera with a brand new and unique Minolta V…
This review is part of the Cameras of the Dead series which features dead cameras that I’ve wanted to review that either didn’t work, or was otherwise unable to shoot. This review was originally part of a three camera review published on October 29, 2021 in the 10th edition of…
I don’t know what it is about horror movies and sequels, but people don’t ever seem to get enough of them. Classic horror franchises like ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ have a ridiculous amount of sequels, but perhaps even more ridiculous is how often these franchises…
This is a Minolta Maxxum 800si, a 35mm single lens reflex camera produced by Minolta starting in 1997. The 800si was the flagship model in Minolta’s fourth generation of autofocus SLRs after it’s predecessor, the 9xi was discontinued. When the Maxxum 800si was sold in Europe and Japan, it was…
