www.cjo.info
20150216-0004
After a long time collecting mainly Pentax and Olympus cameras, I've recently been concentrating on Minolta instead.
Minolta launched their massively successful X series of cameras in 1981 with the X-700. The X-700's main claim to fame was it's fully automatic programmed exposure mode. It was one of the first high end cameras to feature such a thing. The X-700 had other high-end features such as TTL flash metering, depth-of-field preview and the ability to take a 3.5fps motordrive.
But it had a rather poor manual mode which only diaplyed a suggested shutter speed in the viewfinder, not the actual shutter speed as well. This meant you had to take your eye away from the viewfinder to transfer the suggested shutter speed to the dial.
Both the cheapper X-500 (1983) and X-300 (1984) models that followed corrected this problem with a manual mode that displayed both the suggested and actually set shutter speeds... I always wondered why Minolta never realease an X-700 mark 2 to bring this feature to the top-of-the-range model!
The X-500 has all the high-end features of the X-700 apart from the fully automatic mode and so is considered the best X series model by many people. (The X-300 had the updated manual mode, but dropped the depth-of-field preview and TTL flash metering to keep costs down.)
Here you can see the X-500 shown with a very nice 50mm f1.4 standard lens and the previously mentioned 3.5fps motordrive, which has a very nice grip and even a second shutter button for vertical shots.
20150216-0004
After a long time collecting mainly Pentax and Olympus cameras, I've recently been concentrating on Minolta instead.
Minolta launched their massively successful X series of cameras in 1981 with the X-700. The X-700's main claim to fame was it's fully automatic programmed exposure mode. It was one of the first high end cameras to feature such a thing. The X-700 had other high-end features such as TTL flash metering, depth-of-field preview and the ability to take a 3.5fps motordrive.
But it had a rather poor manual mode which only diaplyed a suggested shutter speed in the viewfinder, not the actual shutter speed as well. This meant you had to take your eye away from the viewfinder to transfer the suggested shutter speed to the dial.
Both the cheapper X-500 (1983) and X-300 (1984) models that followed corrected this problem with a manual mode that displayed both the suggested and actually set shutter speeds... I always wondered why Minolta never realease an X-700 mark 2 to bring this feature to the top-of-the-range model!
The X-500 has all the high-end features of the X-700 apart from the fully automatic mode and so is considered the best X series model by many people. (The X-300 had the updated manual mode, but dropped the depth-of-field preview and TTL flash metering to keep costs down.)
Here you can see the X-500 shown with a very nice 50mm f1.4 standard lens and the previously mentioned 3.5fps motordrive, which has a very nice grip and even a second shutter button for vertical shots.