Minolta Hi-Matic AF

Canon got the headlines with the AF35M, but Minolta was right there beside it. The Hi-Matic AF arrived in 1979, the same year both cameras landed and the autofocus point-and-shoot stopped being a rumor and started being a thing you could actually buy. Canon's Sure Shot is the one collectors remember, partly because of the marketing. The Minolta does most of the same job and usually costs less on the shelf today, which is the whole reason to care about it now.

It is a chunky black brick with a fixed 38mm lens and an infrared active autofocus system that fires when you half-press. You hear a soft chatter as it ranges, then a confirmation in the finder, then the leaf shutter trips with that quiet flat click that compacts make. The viewfinder is bright enough, with framelines and a focus zone indicator, but there is no rangefinder patch to confirm focus by eye. You are trusting the electronics. Most of the time they are right. In low contrast or through glass they hunt and miss, and you only find out at the lab.

Exposure is fully programmed. A CdS cell reads the scene, the camera picks aperture and speed together, and you get no say in either. That is fine in even light and frustrating the moment the sun is behind your subject, because a single-cell program AE has no way to know the face you care about is in shadow, so it sets for the bright background and the subject goes dark. On a body like this the Zone Light Meter app is how you stay ahead of that. Take a spot reading off the shadow you actually care about, see where the camera's program is going to land, and either move closer to fill the frame or wait for the light to even out before you let it shoot.

The leaf shutter is worth dwelling on. Because the blades sit in the lens and open and close as one, flash syncs at every speed. It has a built-in flash you can switch on for fill, so daylight fill works without the focal-plane sync ceiling that trips up SLR shooters. Flip it on, stand close, and you fill the shadows the program meter would otherwise crush.

The honest weakness is the same one that kills most cameras of this vintage. It is a sealed electronic box that depends entirely on batteries and on a meter cell that drifts with age. There is no manual override, no mechanical backup speed, nothing to fall back on when the cell goes lazy or the battery contacts corrode. A dead Hi-Matic AF is just a paperweight, and a CLA on a forty-year-old plastic compact rarely makes economic sense.

Who buys one today is the person who wants a competent autofocus snapshot camera for not much money, and who is happy to shoot in good light and let the machine drive. Cross-shopped against the Canon Sure Shot it is the value pick, a little less famous, a little cheaper, and just as capable of grabbing a sharp frame on a sunny afternoon.