I remember when I first was getting into film I was deciding between starting with one of three cameras: a Canon AE-1, a Pentax K1000, or a Minolta X-700. I wrote about it a few weeks ago, but when I pursued the Canon AE-1 I was surprised to find the seller also hoping to get rid of a Minolta X-700 camera body with a sad, dusted, broken lens. I was pretty bummed when I couldn’t use the X-700, but I figured I’d end up with a lens for it down the road.
About a month or two after I bought the Canon and the Minolta, I was invited to my friend’s lake house in Three Lakes, Wisconsin. Of course on my packing list was my camera gear – and tons of film. I planned to bring my digital camera, my instant film camera, and also my only fully functioning 35mm film camera at the time, my Canon AE-1.
A week before the trip, I got a notification on OfferUp. Another person selling a Minolta X-700 with a near pristine 28-85mm, F 3.5 zoom lens finally got back to me. Boom, I had my lens. Sometimes, shit just works out.
Meeting up with the seller for this purchase was very anti climactic – he was a 60 year old man from a town nearby where I grew up. He seemed to be looking for some quick cash. All I had to do was drive to a parking lot in front of a Starbucks 10 minutes away, wait for him, inspect the camera, and buy. As I was chatting with him, I asked him if he had any stories or memories with the camera and he told me, very quickly, “no it was my father’s”. I didn’t want to pry, but I do often like to know if the camera was an important part of someone’s life. In any event, $20 for a fully functioning Minolta X-700 with a 28-85mm zoom is a one of the best steals I’ve made in my time collecting. If you know, you know.
The Minolta X-700 was easily one of Minolta’s most popular manual focus cameras. It was first introduced in 1981 and features manual, programmed, and aperture priority modes for making exposures. A fully electronic camera, it quickly became the rival to Canon’s recent success in the Canon AE-1. They did an excellent job marketing this camera – it won many awards for it’s advancements. I’m a sucker for retro advertisements, check out one of Minolta’s television spots here. Shutter speeds on the X-700 include Bulb Mode, 1s, 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s, 1/15s, 1/30s, 1/60s (flash synchronization), 1/125s, 1/250s, 1/500s, and 1/1000s. It boasts an exposure compensation knob from -2 to +2, which was a cutting edge feature to have on an SLR at the time. Quirky features include a self timer, TTL metering, and an over/underexposure “beep” that the camera omits if it is not sensing a good exposure. Overall, the camera has almost every feature you could imagine, and an extremely clean look with an all black finish.
As I mentioned, I was lucky to find this lens just in time for my trip to the North Woods of Wisconsin – Three Lakes, to be exact. My buddy has a lake house up there – and we were expecting a ton of snow which meant snowmobiling, ice fishing, snowshoeing, and tons of opportunity to try out my new lens with some Ilford Delta 100. Unfortunately, we were only able to get a day or two of snow dumped on us so the opportunity to shoot in the snow was slim – but I left the trip with a few photos I enjoy a lot.
Following that trip to Wisconsin, I took the X-700 with the zoom lens to a forest preserve in my home town, and loaded it with some Kodak Select Series 200 B&W film that expired in 2002 – this is what happened. It was good to know the self timer was functioning :).
I don’t think the Minolta X-700 gets the love it deserves, and I will never understand why. Any time somebody asks me about starter SLR cameras, I point them in this direction. If you’re looking for an in depth video review on the X-700, watch this video by one of my favorite content creators on Youtube – Eduardo Pavez Goye.
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Shutter Hunter 