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Another of the old Minolta classics to play with. It's a constant f4.5, highly rated for IQ and really compact. This may just be my new favorite walkaround lens.

I've been putting this rig together for a while now, one piece at a time. It's all just about new in condition.The Minolta Maxxum XTSi was released in 1998, the 3200i flash is from a few years earlier.This is one of the toys I lusted after when it came out but couldn't afford, the body alone was 600 bucks in 1998.Minolta digital cameras appeared not long after this, rhen the line was bought by Sony. If I put this camera next to my Sony Alpha digital the XTSi, although smaller, shows a lot of the same design trends, likely from...

Several months ago I found a Minolta XG-M from the early 80s in a thrift shop, for 5 bucks. It cleaned up really pretty but needed light seals and a mirror damper to really be back in shape.It's ready to go now, maybe it will make another 25 or 30 years.I used Kodak Hi Def 400 for these, Walmart developed the film and I scanned the negatives with my Epson scanner.

TOKYO : Japan's Konica Minolta, one of the world's leading photographic equipment manufacturers, said on Thursday it would stop making all cameras because the market had become too competitive. The company plans to slash 3,700 jobs or about 11 percent of its global workforce by 2007 under a restructuring package that will also see part of its business making high-end digital cameras sold off to Sony. Konica Minolta will also gradually stop making camera film by 2007 to focus on its more profitable optics and medical imaging activities. "In today's era of digital cameras... it became difficult to timely...