Minolta AF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5

Screw a circular polarizer onto the 62mm front, turn it until the sky over the ridge goes dark, and leave it alone. The Minolta AF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 focuses internally, and its filter thread turns neither when it focuses nor when it zooms. Focus on a fence post half a meter away, then on the far hills, swing from 28mm to 105mm, and the polarizer is still where you set it. Many consumer zooms of the period spun their front element every time they focused, so you re-turned the filter after every focus change. Here a polarizer or a grad holder simply stays put.

The optics were not new in 1994. Minolta first released this 13-element, 10-group design in June 1991 as the AF Zoom xi 28-105mm, one of the xi generation's power zooms, with a motor in the barrel that the body could drive. Three years later the motor was gone and the zoom ring moved the glass directly. Hohner's lens tables list it as the same design as the older version, with the same 62mm front thread. A restyled New version arrived in 1997, listed in Minolta's own lens data at 54,000 yen in Japan.

Owners on Dyxum score its color highest and its flare control lowest, with build and sharpness close behind color, a good showing for a zoom with no G on the barrel. That flare score makes sense. Thirteen elements make for a lot of glass-to-air surfaces, so keep the petal hood on and the sun out of the corners. Expect the usual barrel distortion at 28mm. Stopped down, the seven blades turn background highlights into heptagons.

In practice it is a one-lens trip zoom for a Maxxum film body, 28mm for the plaza and 105mm for the face across the table. Close focus is 0.5m, and at 0.217x the frame takes in roughly 17 by 11 cm, about the size of a paperback cover. Unlike the older 28-85 it has no macro mode, which you will not miss for menus and market stalls. It is not a light lens, either: at 485g it makes a small plastic Maxxum feel front-heavy.

Where it lets you down is the long end after dark. At 105mm this is an f/4.5 lens, and under household lamps even ISO 400 film leaves you at shutter speeds too slow to hand-hold at that focal length. Both ends of the aperture range drift as you zoom: full aperture loses about two thirds of a stop, and the smallest setting moves from f/22 to f/27. A Maxxum's own meter reads through the lens and follows that by itself; a handheld reading does not. If you meter in Zone Light Meter and shoot wide open, allow for the drop: at 105mm the reading has to be for f/4.5, not f/3.5. Negative film has the latitude to hide that mistake, whereas a transparency exposed on the f/3.5 figure comes back two thirds of a stop dark.

Used, it sells for a fraction of what the 28-70 G fetches, and Sony's A-mount digital bodies still drive its autofocus. The natural rival is the 24-105 D, a lighter lens that reaches 24mm and adds the distance encoding this one never had. If the price gap between them is wide, the 28-105 is the sensible buy, ideally with a fast 50 in the bag for evenings indoors.