Minolta Maxxum 400si

Switch the Maxxum 400si's little GN 12 pop-up into wireless mode and it stops being a fill light. It becomes a trigger. A Minolta accessory flash on a light stand a few metres off to the side fires on its cue, with no cord and no radio receiver hanging off the hot shoe. For a budget body from 1994 that is a surprising amount of lighting control, and it is easy to imagine plenty of holiday-snap owners never trying it once.

There is a price, and the shutter pays it. In wireless and ratio modes, sync drops to 1/45, so a moving subject will smear unless the flash does the freezing. Shooting normally you get 1/90. Neither number is generous, and daylight fill at 1/90 under a bright sky means stopping well down or loading slower film.

Set it beside the later American Maxxum 500si and the missing pieces are easy to name: no spot meter, and no way to set film speed yourself. P, A, S and M are all here, though. The film speed gap shapes how you use the camera. Load a DX-coded cassette and the body reads it. Load anything else (a bulk-rolled cassette of HP5, a hand-spooled roll of cine stock) and it assumes ISO 100, with no override. The workaround is exposure compensation, which runs three stops either way in half steps. HP5 in a blank cassette wants minus two, and that setting needs checking before every frame, especially after any reset. A roll shot without it comes back two stops dense. Anyone who rolls their own film will meet this on the first cassette.

In the hand it behaves like the other mid-nineties A-mount autofocus bodies: light, focus driven through the body's screw coupling, and one 2CR5 lithium running everything. Shutter priority walks from 1/2000 down to 30 seconds in full stops only. Bulb lives in M and nowhere else, so long night exposures mean committing to manual. The badges confuse auction listings. In Europe this exact camera was the Dynax 500si; in Japan, the Alpha 303si. The American Maxxum 500si is a different, better-equipped body. A panorama version sold as the Maxxum 450si, Ritz Camera got a date edition called the RZ430si, and a Dynax 500si served as the base for Minolta's RD-175 digital SLR, which gives this modest body an odd footnote in early digital history.

With no spot meter, the 8-segment honeycomb does the work in the auto modes, and it handles ordinary light well. A bright window behind the subject can still pull the reading off, though, and a bride's white dress gets placed in middle grey because nothing in the camera can isolate her face. For scenes like that I spot-read the face and the dress with Zone Light Meter, put the shadows on the zone I want, then set the result in M or dial the difference into compensation before the next frame.

A 400si usually sells for less than a decent A-mount lens, which is the real argument for it. It is a cheap, light way onto a mount with a deep catalogue of Minolta glass, with a wireless flash trick thrown in. Just keep a DX-coded film in it, or get in the habit of checking that compensation setting.