Minolta Autocord III

Wind past frame twelve on a roll of 220 and the counter on an Autocord III just keeps going: thirteen, fourteen, on to twenty-four, with nothing to reset. Anyone who has used the export cousin will notice. The Autocord 24, sold abroad as the II, made you reset its counter at frame 13, a fiddle you forget exactly once, and that once costs you a frame. Minolta's home-market version did away with it. A dial sets the body for 12 exposures on 120 or 24 on 220, and the count runs straight through.

Minolta put the III on sale in Japan in December 1965 at 26,900 yen, and Japanese sources call it the last twin-lens reflex the company made. It stayed in the catalogue even after the metered CdS III dropped out in the 1970s, so the plain Autocord outlasted the one with a battery and a needle. I like that. Minolta had long since turned its attention to the SLR, and the TLR it kept selling longest was the simple one.

The taking lens is the New Rokkor 75mm f/3.5, four elements in three groups of new glass, stopping down to f/22. That is the Tessar element count, and lenses of that layout tend to give their best a stop or two down, so I treat f/3.5 as the focusing aperture and f/8 as the working one. Hoods and filters go on a Bay I bayonet, which Minolta lists at 28.5mm. Rollei used the same small fitting on the Rolleicord, so accessories turn up easily.

The shutter is a Citizen MVL, type M-8C, running B and a full second up to 1/500, with a self-timer and both M and X sync. Being a leaf shutter, it syncs electronic flash at every speed, 1/500 included, which makes outdoor fill a simple job instead of the compromise it was on focal-plane bodies of the era. Minolta gives the weight as 995 g. You feel that on a neck strap by mid-afternoon. In return, nothing moves inside the body at the moment of exposure except the leaf blades, so with the hood open and your elbows pulled in, slow speeds are steadier than the numbers suggest.

The obvious gap is the meter: there isn't one. No needle, no cell, only the waist-level ground glass and your own judgement. An incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, taken where your subject stands, is the meter this body never had; set the speed and aperture on the Rokkor and shoot. The second weakness is newer. The 220 setting, the III's main change, has little to do now that fresh 220 film is close to gone. With most of us loading 120, expect to leave the dial on 12.

It usually sells for well under a comparable Rolleiflex, though prices vary a lot with condition. The usual cross-shop is a Yashica Mat-124G or a Rolleicord. Buy the Yashica and you get a built-in meter; buy the Autocord and you carry your own. Against a Rolleicord, it matches the full-second-to-1/500 range of the late models and beats the early ones that topped out lower. For square portraits on a bright day, with a small flash filling the shadows at 1/500, it is hard to fault.