Product of the Day, Day 9: Minolta Maxxum 7000 Autofocus 35mm SLR Camera
Minolta Maxxum 7000- the world’s first autofocus system camera
As I said when I launched the Product of the Day feature, besides the new stuff we are going to be looking back at some interesting or historically significant vintage gear. Today’s product of the day takes us back in time to the 1980s. A 35mm SLR camera may not seem all that relevant today, since the use of film has largely gone out of favor. As far as as historically significant, groundbreaking cameras go, though few are a bigger deal than the Minolta Maxxum 7000. Chances are your digital SLR owes something to the Maxxum 7000’s groundbreaking design, and I am going to share a shopping tip that may benefit you if you are a digital SLR user.
Back in 1985 I was a teenager selling cameras in a local camera store. Autofocus cameras were popular, but they were largely limited to autofocus rangefinder cameras, simple point and shoot models. These cameras would focus by measuring the distance to the subject through infrared or optical means, then set the camera to one of several pre-set focus points. That was the dirty little secret of these cameras- they could not focus precisely on the subject and relied on the slightly wide-angle lens of the camera to achieve sharp focus, through its depth of field. The depth of field of the lens was usually adequate to compensate for the inexact focusing. Over time these camera went from having 5-8 preset focus points to several dozen, which made focusing more than precise enough.
To use autofocus on an SLR camera, precise focusing is necessary. Several manufacturers had autofocus lenses that mounted on their manual focus camera bodies, but these lenses were poorly conceived and executed. They focused slowly, required their own batteries, and were bulky and heavy. To focus them you had to press a button on the side of the lens. Then came the Minolta Maxxum 7000.
When the Minolta Maxxum 7000 was introduced in 1985 it caught the other major manufacturers unaware and was quite the sensation. (Nice job by Minolta keeping it under wraps!) It was introduced as a complete system camera with a new lens mount and a complete series of autofocus lenses. When you pressed the shutter partway the camera body would focus the camera via a motor in the camera, which drove a cog in the lens’ mount. Many professionals trying the Maxxum 7000 were surprised when they looked at the results, as they were often sharper than what they achieved focusing manually. Most of us thought better of our focusing abilities!
Sony Alpha 900 Digital SLR
The once-great Minolta Corporation has since merged with Konica to become Konica-Minolta, and recently left the camera business entirely, selling its assets to Sony. Sony’s Alpha series of digital SLR cameras owe their existence to Minolta’s decades of work, all the way back to the Maxxum 7000 and its lens mount system. This is what leads us to our modern-day shopping tip!
The Minolta Maxxum 7000 in the image above is my own particular sample. My mom found it for sale with an additional lens for the mere price of $10.00. And it works! She picked it up for me not knowing what a great camera and great bargain she had found.
See the 50mm lens on the Maxxum 7000? It will work perfectly on the $3,000 Sony digital SLR above- or any other Minolta or Sony digital SLR, for that matter. The consumer grade manufacturer’s lenses from the 1980s are very frequently better than some of the lenses being sold today. The older lenses are sharper, better constructed, and have wider f-stops that are better in low light or for photographing action. They are also designed to cover a piece of 35mm film, which is bigger than the sensors used in most digital SLRs. These means that not only will the lenses work on your camera, they will be covering less area and using the center of the lens’ image, which tends to lead to sharper results.
If you can find an old autofocus SLR from Canon, Minolta, or Nikon and it has the Canon, Minolta, or Nikon lens on it (no third parties) there is a good chance it has a great lens on it that will work perfectly on your modern digital SLR. The 50mm lenses in particular are very desirable. They work great in low light, provide a very bright viewfinder image, are extremely sharp, and make great portrait lenses. I will probably pick up a Sony digital SLR someday just to put that nice 50mm lens to use. As far as I am concerned, you can’t have too many cameras (and believe me, I have a bunch…) and every photographer should have a fixed focal length lens like a 50mm in their inventory. You will be surprised at how much more crisp it is than your zoom lenses.
So, if you ever come across a camera like this at a thrift shop, garage sale, a flea market, church rummage sale, craigslist, wherever… and the lens will mount on your SLR camera, if the price is right jump on it and snag those old lenses, especially if it is a fixed length like a 50mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 85mm, 105mm, 135mm, or 200mm. You just might land yourself a real prize.
Stop back tomorrow for the Product of the Day!
