Minolta X-7

Nikon's EM showed a beginner the shutter speed with a swinging needle. The Minolta X-7 lit LEDs instead, and underneath that the two cameras follow the same basic recipe: aperture priority only, an automatic shutter from 1 s to 1/1000, and a beeper that warns when the light gets thin. Add Olympus's OM10 and you have the AE-only entry class the X-7 was born into. Minolta priced it at roughly half what an XD cost and put it on television. A commercial that aired in late March 1980, starring a college student named Yoshiko Miyazaki, made it a hit.

The speed dial is a short list. Auto, a plus or minus 2 EV compensation scale, B, and X at 1/60, and nothing else; there is no manual speed anywhere on the body. In place of control you get information. An LED scale in the finder shows the speed the camera has chosen, and the piezo beeper goes off once the auto speed slips below 1/60, which tells you to brace against something or open the lens up. Rest a finger on the release and the XG family's touch switch wakes the display. Set the self-timer and a blinking LED on the front counts it down.

The hardware is plain, light XG stuff: a horizontal cloth focal-plane shutter that runs stepless in auto, a center-weighted CdS cell, and the SR mount, so any manual-focus Minolta SLR lens fits. Flash syncs at 1/60 through the hot shoe, and the X setting on the dial gives you that speed directly. Early X-7s were chrome and came with the older, dimmer focusing screen. Look for the black version from 1981 instead. It added an XG-M style front grip and the brighter Acute Matte screen, and composing at dusk is noticeably easier with it.

Power is the real problem. Like the rest of the XG line, the X-7 will not work at all without a battery, and it has no mechanical speed to limp home on. The EM wins this one: Nikon left a mechanical 1/90 for the day the cells die, and Minolta did not. The meter lags too. Minolta's own XD already used silicon cells with more range and faster response than this CdS cell, and like any center-weighted meter it lets a bright sky pull the exposure down. Turning the compensation scale is the only correction the body accepts.

Do not mix it up with the X-7A of 1985. That is a different camera from a different family, an all-black X-370 with metered manual speeds. The original X-7 sells cheaply today. Buyers tend to be people who want the camera from that commercial, or a light first SLR to put Minolta glass on. If you need manual speeds, skip it and look for an X-700.

If you keep one, use that compensation scale on purpose. Spot-read the shadows with Zone Light Meter, put them on the zone you want, check the speed you get against the LED the camera lights, and dial in the difference, up to two stops either way.