Minolta Maxxum 5

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is that there is almost nothing to it. The Maxxum 5 weighs about as much as a paperback with the battery in, and the polycarbonate shell flexes a little if you squeeze it. It does not feel expensive. It feels like the camera Minolta built when the whole industry could see digital coming and nobody wanted to spend money tooling a metal flagship. So they made a small, fast, genuinely good SLR out of plastic and sold it cheap.

The viewfinder is bright for a body this size, with a clean focusing screen and a row of seven AF points that light up red when they lock. Autofocus is the surprise here. It is quick and it hunts less than you would expect from a 2001 budget body, and the wide-area sensor grabs off-center subjects without much drama. The shutter runs from 30 seconds up to about 1/2000, flash syncs near 1/90, and the whole thing is loud in a cheerful clattery way, the motor drive buzzing the film through at a couple of frames a second. Loading is DX-coded and idiot-proof. Drop the cartridge in, pull the leader to the mark, close the back, done.

This was the entry rung of the Maxxum A-mount ladder, below the 7 and the 9, and it anchors the same mount that eventually carried over to Sony's Alpha DSLRs when Sony bought the line in 2006. That lineage is the practical reason to own one now. Every Minolta AF lens and most Sony A-mount glass mounts and meters on it, so you can build a film kit around the same fast primes people put on their digital bodies. The metering is a 14-segment honeycomb matrix, with a spot button on the back when you want a single-segment reading. The matrix mode handles ordinary daylight fine.

It does not handle everything fine. Point it into a backlit window or a snowfield and the meter does what every averaging system does, which is protect the bright stuff and bury the shadows. For those scenes an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you actually want and set the exposure yourself, instead of letting the body average a contrasty frame into mud.

The honest weakness is the body itself. It is plastic, the battery door is flimsy, and a two-CR2 design means a dead pair of cells leaves you with a paperweight, since there is no mechanical fallback. These are not cameras anyone babied, so the ones on the used market have usually been knocked around.

Which is also why they are nearly free. People cross-shop the Maxxum 5 against the Canon Rebel and the Nikon N65, the same disposable-feeling autofocus bodies from the end of film, and it usually wins on AF speed and finder brightness while losing on prestige. Nobody collects these. You buy one because you already own A-mount glass, or because you want a light, capable shooter you will not cry over if it gets rained on.