Minolta Maxxum 7xi

Next to the flagship 9xi, the 7xi is an xi body with a flash in its head. The 9xi left the flash out and went for 1/12000. The 7xi stops at 1/8000 and gives you a pop-up unit instead, guide number 12 in meters at ISO 100, wide enough to cover a 28mm lens. That is fill for a face across a cafe table. It will not light a room. The useful part is what happens in manual: with the flash raised, M mode still lets you choose any speed from 1/200 down to 30 seconds, or bulb, so you can drag the shutter at dusk and keep the sky glowing behind a sharp, flashed subject.

Then there is the automation, which is the reason the xi line exists. Minolta's 1991 manual describes Eye-Start, where sensors in the eyepiece and the grip wake the autofocus, the meter and the power zoom as the camera comes up to your face. Fit an xi power-zoom lens and ASZ goes further, choosing a focal length from the subject's distance, while image-size lock holds a walking figure at the same size in the frame. It is clever, and it can be distracting on a busy street. Zooming by hand is often simpler. The later Maxxum 7 puts far more on external dials, and a 7xi user who tries one will notice. In Europe this body was the Dynax 7xi; in Japan, the Alpha 7xi.

Underneath, the specification is properly serious. The focal-plane shutter runs from 30 seconds to 1/8000 in half stops in S and M, plus bulb, with flash sync at 1/200. You get two metering patterns: the 14-segment honeycomb, good from EV 0 to 20, or spot, from EV 3 to 20. The 700si later listed center-weighted as a third pattern. Exposure compensation reaches four stops either way in half steps, which is a lot of room. DX coding reads ISO 25 to 5000, and you can set speed yourself anywhere from ISO 6 to 6400, so push-processed rolls and long-expired film are easy to rate however you like.

What lets the 7xi down is power and weight. Everything runs off a single 2CR5 lithium cell, and when it dies the camera is a paperweight: no shutter, no focus. Carry a spare. The body alone is 650 g without lens or battery, and the xi zooms that make Eye-Start and ASZ worth having are bulky, so the whole kit gets heavy around the neck by late afternoon. Continuous drive manages 4 frames per second, with a busy whir that leaves no doubt the motor is working.

As a used buy, the 7xi gives you a 1/8000 top speed, a real spot meter and access to the large, inexpensive pool of Minolta A lenses, including the older non-power zooms and primes that skip the xi gimmicks entirely. Even a pattern meter has to guess on a strongly backlit or high-contrast scene, and the honeycomb is no exception. When the light gets hard, take a spot reading with Zone Light Meter, place the shadows on the zone you want, and set that result through exposure compensation or straight into M. The spot mode on the body is there to confirm it.