The Minolta Maxxum 50

I started this forum for any collecting hobby and it turned into my camera collecting and using forum. I use it mostly to keep a record of my photo adventures. Nobody but me seems to have photo adventures that visit here....but however. I have so many cameras now that I forget which is which and which ones work and which ones don't. If you have cameras and adventures you would be welcome to post here.

Moderator: DuncaninFrance

Post Reply
User avatar
Niner
Site Admin
Posts: 11519
Joined: Sat Mar 15, 2003 1:00 pm
Location: Lower Alabama

The Minolta Maxxum 50

Post by Niner » Fri May 28, 2021 2:36 pm

As the film camera new production age came to a close Minolta was packing all of their technical knowledge bank inventory into the cameras they were producing. Many features that may have been slowly introduced one year after the next to inspire new camera sales were all of a sudden about to be worthless so there was no use in protecting any of them for a later introduction. They must have felt the clock ticking on the demise of film popularity in the face of the digital camera age that was fast pushing film cameras and film production itself nearly out of existence. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012 because the mass market end of the film age brought it down and turned my Kodak stock into nothing.

The very bottom of the last of Minolta line has to be the Maxxum 50 or the Dynax 40 in 2004. This camera had all of the program modes that had come to be standard along with ASM standard features. There is auto focus, four segment focus choice in a two segment meter, date, time imprints, double exposure mode, self timer, built in flash with various modifications, etc. Shutter speeds ran 30 seconds to 1/2000. The camera did all this stuff at a bottom of the market SLR price and the features and controls were laid out in a consumer ergonomic way....which is something Nikon was never able to do.

The next step up was the Minolta Maxxum 70. Now this was a camera that did wonders besides the things the Maxxum 50 would do and also at a cheap price relative to professional cameras. The Maxxum 70 had a 14 segment honeycomb auto focus that could be fine tuned to exactly where in the honeycomb you wanted to focus. The really big show all of their cards move was a 15 custom feature menu that you could set for things like leaving the leader of the film out on rewind or making it so that the built in flash can flash enough to assist auto focus in low light.

Meanwhile, during this same time the Maxxum 7 was the top of the line and had the same 14 segment honeycomb metering but added all of the bells and whistles Minolta knew including an additional 20 custom features more than the Maxxum 70 and upping the top shutter speed to 1/8000. Maxxum 7's still bring over $200 even on ebay and many consider the 7 Minolta's finest product and no other film camera company produced anything better....or maybe it's equal.

What I headed this post was Minolta Maxxum 50. I got one the other day for shipping and all $25 with a Tamron 28-200 lens. It came with a roll of 800 speed Fuji film already in it. One of the odd things about this camera and the Maxxum 70 is that you can't open the back without batteries in the camera. Probably whoever put the film in put the camera on a shelf and when the batteries died the new seller just sold the camera with the film because he didn't know how to open the back. Whatever, the film came out pretty grainy when I did the developing. This could partly be my developing skills .... or the 800 extreme speed...or it could be partly the age of the film and how the camera was stored. In any case I got the camera to fill a slot in the collection and am happy I bought it.

I'll include some photos of the silver 50 next to a black 70. The layout of the functions are different.
Attachments
DSC03086.jpg
DSC03087.jpg
DSC03088.jpg
DSC03089.jpg
img455.jpg
img456.jpg
Post Reply