Minolta HI-Matic AF2
Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2022 4:00 pm
Had this one a while. I was gifted it along with a more interesting Minolta XG-M. Somebody was showing an AF2 as a look at this post on facebook and I got to looking at mine a little closer. First thing was to clean the corrosion out of the battery box and put in some penlight batteries.
This was a granny camera in around 1981. Just select the film speed. Pop in the film. Advance to first shot and you were ready to go. If you needed flash, the camera told you, an you slide on the flash switch and waited for a green light. The camera with a 38m 2.8 lens used a light meter guided by infrared bouncing signal to adjust the shutter speed between 1/8 of a second to 1/420 of a second. Not much could go wrong for family snapshots as long as you didn't want a close up. This camera even had a lot of beeps to give you various warnings and printed the key to understanding them on the back of the camera.
I put in a roll of expired 400 speed Fuji color film and proceeded on another adventure. Result.... you can't win them all. The negatives were so light as to be mostly not there at all. Two came out enough that I could get a scan. When I used the scanners enhance colors choice it almost made a connection to a recognizable printable image. However.... "almost" was way short of getting there. On second thought, if I wanted to produce a pretend to be art mysterious image it worked fine. I think the biggest problem was that the shutter speed was way too short because the camera failed on the diagnosis as 400 ASA ....and the old film probably had something to do with it too.
This was a granny camera in around 1981. Just select the film speed. Pop in the film. Advance to first shot and you were ready to go. If you needed flash, the camera told you, an you slide on the flash switch and waited for a green light. The camera with a 38m 2.8 lens used a light meter guided by infrared bouncing signal to adjust the shutter speed between 1/8 of a second to 1/420 of a second. Not much could go wrong for family snapshots as long as you didn't want a close up. This camera even had a lot of beeps to give you various warnings and printed the key to understanding them on the back of the camera.
I put in a roll of expired 400 speed Fuji color film and proceeded on another adventure. Result.... you can't win them all. The negatives were so light as to be mostly not there at all. Two came out enough that I could get a scan. When I used the scanners enhance colors choice it almost made a connection to a recognizable printable image. However.... "almost" was way short of getting there. On second thought, if I wanted to produce a pretend to be art mysterious image it worked fine. I think the biggest problem was that the shutter speed was way too short because the camera failed on the diagnosis as 400 ASA ....and the old film probably had something to do with it too.
