Minolta XG-7

Nine at night on a wet street, and the XG-7 is doing the work. Rest a fingertip on the shutter button and an LED lights beside the speed scale at the right of the frame, slipping below the 60 (the mark Minolta's manual suggests as the camera-shake line) and on toward a full second as the light fails. You pick the aperture; the body times a stepless speed. Then a neon sign threatens to fool the meter, so you press the Auto-setting release, turn the dial to 1/30, and watch the whole scale go dark.

Minolta never pretended otherwise. The owner's manual titles its metering chapter with a blunt parenthesis, automatic mode only, and the manual-exposure section spells out the workaround: go back to A, note which LED is lit, turn the dial to that speed, take the picture. On a tripod in front of a building, fine. Under streetlights that change every ten steps, you will miss frames doing it.

It arrived in 1977 alongside the XD-11, the cheaper aperture-priority SR-mount body slotted between the XD and the mechanical SR-T line Minolta was still building. Japan knew it as the XG-E and Europe as the XG-2. In the July 1978 Modern Photography, B&H listed the XG-7 body at $195.90, against $289.90 for an XD-11 and $139.90 for an SR-T 201. Fifty-six dollars over the SR-T bought automation in a smaller, lighter body, while the XD-11 asked ninety-four more for shutter priority, an aperture readout in the finder and a meter that stays lit in manual. The SR-T's match-needle meter, meanwhile, worked in the only mode it had.

Bare, it weighs 505 grams, and its horizontal-travel focal-plane shutter tops out at 1/1000. The finder shows 93 percent of the frame on a matte Fresnel screen, with a horizontal split-image spot inside a microprism band, and in A it reports the speed but never the aperture. There is no depth-of-field preview button. The touch switch wants skin; in gloves, or with dry fingers, a slight press on the button wakes the circuits instead. Slide a charged Auto Electroflash 200X into the shoe and the body forces 1/60, overriding even a manual setting, while the 60 LED blinks as the ready light. The Auto Winder G couples to the base for up to two frames a second.

Everything here hangs on two 1.5-volt silver-oxide cells in the base, which run both the metering and the shutter's electronic timing. When the voltage sags, the release simply will not fire, and no mechanical speed waits in reserve. The manual warns that old cells can misbehave below 0 C, so fit fresh ones before winter use and carry spares in an inside pocket. One more oddity from the same book: on B, a metal cable release that touches the metal body ends the exposure on the spot.

Its unmetered manual mode is the usual reason buyers step up to an XD-11 or X-700. Even the better-equipped XG-9 that followed in 1979 kept manual unmetered; for an XG that meters in manual, look to the later XG-M. Left in A, though, the XG-7 makes a patient teacher for a student: choose the depth of field, let the body time it, and watch the LED for the moment it slips under 60. For manual work, let Zone Light Meter stand in for the meter this body switches off: take an incident or spot reading, then set it on the dial and aperture ring.