Minolta Maxxum 300si

Hunt the 300si for an A, an S or an M and you come up empty. Apart from its own panorama and store-brand variants, it is the si-series Maxxum with no exposure mode you can set yourself: full-auto P, five subject scenes, and that is the whole menu. In the si lineup it sits below the PASM 400si and 500si, and it arrived in 1995 for a buyer who wanted the A mount and autofocus without ever learning what an aperture does. Europe got it as the Dynax 300si and Japan as the Alpha 101si. Ritz Camera sold it under its own badge as the Maxxum RZ330si, which tells you it was pitched at walk-in buyers looking for an easy first SLR.

The scenes are portrait, landscape, close-up, sports and night portrait. Each one leans the program toward a fast shutter or a particular aperture, but you never see a number you picked. Speeds run from 30 seconds to 1/2000 and stop there. No bulb exists, so a long night exposure ends when the program decides it ends. DX coding matters more here than on most bodies. Load an uncoded cassette and the camera quietly sets ISO 100, so bulk-loaded 400-speed film in reusable cassettes comes back two stops over box speed on every frame, with no setting anywhere to stop it.

In the hand it is a small plastic thing, 380 g without a lens, running on one 2CR5 lithium cell. The finder uses a roof mirror rather than a glass prism, and you notice. It shows 90 percent of the frame at 0.75x, so the view is small and a little dim, and the edges of your negatives will hold things you never saw through the eyepiece. Autofocus does all the focusing; the finder is there for framing.

Flash comes from a pop-up unit of guide number 12 with normal, red-eye reduction and slow-sync settings. Sync tops out at 1/90. Minolta's own 5600HS manual files the 300si with the 1/90 sync bodies that cannot use high-speed sync, so even the best flash Minolta made gives you nothing faster for daylight fill. That is the real limit of this camera. With no exposure compensation, no AE lock and no priority or manual mode, your only lever in hard backlight is the pop-up flash, held to 1/90. Snow and beach scenes, slide film with its narrow latitude, and night work past 30 seconds are where the program runs out of answers. Ordinary front-lit and overcast scenes on color negative it handles without fuss.

The Maxxum 350si, also sold as the Panorama Elite, is the same idea with a panorama mode added; the 300si has none. To choose your own depth of field you have to move up to an si-series body with full PASM. On this one, a Zone Light Meter reading earns its place before the shutter fires: it shows whether a scene sits inside what the program can handle, or whether you need the flash up or a faster film in the next roll.

A working 300si is usually one of the cheapest A-mount film bodies you can find. People buy it as a light, inexpensive way to put Minolta autofocus glass on film, or they find one in a parent's closet. Feed it ISO 400 color negative, keep the sun behind you, and it delivers the pictures it was designed for.