Minolta XG-9

Look at the top edge of the XG-9's finder and you will see a small window with the number from your lens ring in it. That window is the main reason to pick this body over the XG-7. Minolta brought the XG-9 out in 1979 to replace that camera, and sold the same body in Japan as the XG-S. It was the first XG to show the set aperture in the finder and the first with a depth-of-field preview button. On an aperture-priority camera the f-stop is the one setting you choose, so reading it with your eye still at the finder saves you lowering the camera every time you change it. The preview button earns its place at f/8 and f/11, when you want to know whether the fence behind a portrait goes soft or stays sharp enough to read.

The screen came down from the XD, Minolta's more expensive line. It is the Acute Matte type: a split-image spot in the centre, a microprism band around it, and a brighter matte field than the XG-7 had. With a fast Rokkor wide open, the microprism shimmer settles quickly. When the subject has no straight edge to line up in the split, like a face in profile or a tangle of branches, you can judge focus on the matte itself, and the screen is bright enough for that to work indoors.

Using it is simple. Pick an aperture and the body times the shutter anywhere from a full second to 1/1000, with LEDs beside the frame showing the speed it has chosen. Flash sync is 1/60. That is plenty for bounce flash in a living room and a problem for daylight fill, where bright sun at 1/60 pushes you to f/16 or smaller even with ISO 100 film, leaving little room for the flash. The back comes off, so the Data Back G fits, and Rokkorfiles notes that the later Quartz Data Back G fits too if you want dates printed into the corner of the frame. MC and MD Rokkors give you full automation. Older pre-MC SR lenses will mount, but they only work stopped down, and the aperture window needs MD lenses, which carry the matching scale.

The trouble starts in manual. Once you leave auto the meter switches off, so the LEDs stop suggesting a speed. You can still see the aperture, because that window is just optics reading the lens ring, but nothing tells you whether that f-stop suits the speed on the dial. The XG-7 worked the same way. Minolta didn't change it until the XG-M in 1981, which kept the meter running in manual. On an XG-9 in manual, Zone Light Meter is your meter: take an incident or spot reading on the phone and set the dial from that.

That gap is a big part of why the XG-9 usually sells cheaply on the used market. If you shoot mostly in auto and want to see your aperture without lowering the camera, it is the XG to buy. If you meter by hand most of the time, the XG-M is the better choice and worth the extra money.

When buying, test it with fresh batteries and run through the auto speeds from a full second up. Then look through the finder with an MD lens on and turn the aperture ring. The number in the window should be crisp and should follow the ring, with no haze across the little prism. A fogged or dark readout takes away the one feature the XG-7 never had.