Got this one the other day. It was introduced in 1995 about the time that digital was just getting a start. It was intended for the customer who just wanted to take a photo that was out of an SLR and wanted it to be pretty much a simple no confusion instrument for taking film pictures with a great chance of turning out ok prints. The mind of Minolta was up to it. The 300si was auto everything....except you could slip the lens into manual focus. Other than that, there was nothing manual. No apertures or shutter speeds to tinker with. You put it in Program or picked one of a handful of specific auto program modes. You could control flash and red eye on or off. It had a built in flash, although you could add and extra if you wanted.
The auto focus was based on a 8 segment honey comb and the shutter speeds were from 1/2000 to a respectable 30 seconds.
You can pick one up cheap on ebay any day. No nimrod would want one once he discovered how f stops and shutter speeds work. However.... if you were to give your granny a camera to take some photos of the family gathering on the 4th of July, this would be the one to hand her.
I also tried out a new B&W film... to me. The Arista Edu came cheap and was about the only B&W available from my usual dealer. I've read reports that were pretty equally divided between not liking and no opinion. I think it proved pretty good from the standpoint of the quality of the image developed in D76. I'm happy with it. Good thing, I've got another ten or eleven rolls.
The Minolta Maxxum 300si
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