Minolta Autocord MXS / MXV

1/400. That is the last number on the speed ring of the first Autocord, and it is the quickest way to tell this October 1955 camera from the ones Minolta built after it. Later Autocords reached 1/500. This one stops about a third of a stop short, in a Citizen MXV shutter that Minolta's own history lists as type MA-2, marked B and 1 to 1/400 with a self-timer. At launch it sold for 29,800 yen. It weighs 970 g, which you will notice on a neck strap by mid-afternoon.

The name on the shutter is where the model gets confusing. Export bodies carry the same Citizen-made unit under the Optiper brand, engraved either MXS or MXV, and collector tables use that engraving to split the model in two. Japanese Wikipedia skips the letters and calls it the Autocord I early type. Inside the MXS there is one more wrinkle worth knowing: a second version from 1956 added a depth-of-field scale beside the crank. If you like reading your zone of focus off the body instead of guessing, look for that scale, because the earliest examples go without it.

What this model added over the Minoltacord Automat sits on the front panel. A small window above the viewing lens shows the speed and aperture you have set, so you can read them from above, over the viewing lens. The viewing lens itself is a 75mm f/3.2, a touch faster than the taking lens, and it moves with the taking lens on the single focusing lever every Autocord shares (to my hands still quicker than a knob). How bright the ground glass looks on a seventy-year-old example depends on whoever owned it before you.

The taking lens is the four-element Rokkor 75mm f/3.5, a Tessar-type design that stayed in every Autocord, stopping down to f/22. Around both lenses sits a Bay I bayonet, so the filters and hoods made for a Rolleicord fit here too. The English Minoltacord manual lists the same Citizen-made Optiper MXS for both the Minoltacord and the Autocord. As a leaf shutter, the Citizen syncs flash at every speed on the ring, 1/400 included.

There is no help with light at all. No meter, not even a selenium cell, and the dial ends at 1/400. Load ISO 400 film on a beach at noon and f/22 becomes your only escape; wide-open portraits in sun need an ND filter or slower stock. Age is the other problem. Sticky slow speeds and dried grease in the focusing mount are the usual faults on these bodies, so work the shutter at a full second and rack the lever end to end before you pay.

Slow film makes the speed ceiling mostly disappear. With ISO 100 in daylight you are around 1/400 at f/8, comfortably inside the ring. An incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, taken where your subject stands, is the meter this body never had: transfer it to the rings, confirm the pair in that little window, and you have twelve square frames to a roll of 120 that land where you meant them to.