Minolta Minoltaflex II

Thirty-one thousand nine hundred yen, case included. That is the price Japanese Wikipedia gives for the Minoltaflex II, the first Minoltaflex of the postwar years, which Minolta brought out in July 1950. The money bought a knob-wound 6x6 TLR, and the reason to want one sits in the lower lens. The same source calls its Rokkor 75mm f/3.5 the first coated lens Minolta ever put on a product. If you follow the company's glass, the coated story starts here.

The manual calls it a coated quadruple, which means four elements; Japanese Wikipedia files the design as a Tessar type in three groups. An iris lever sets the aperture anywhere from f/3.5 to f/22. Above the taking lens sits a coated Minolta Anastigmat 75mm f/3.2 for viewing. That is roughly a quarter stop faster than the lens that makes the negative, and in a dim room every bit of extra light on the focusing screen helps.

The hood erects itself when you open it, and a large hinged magnifier swings in for critical focus. The same hood converts to a direct view finder. Use it for anything that moves: the waist-level image is reversed left to right, and a child running across the frame goes the wrong way under your eye. Film advance is by knob. Minolta's semi-automatic answer, the Minoltaflex IIB, replaced this body in April 1952, so the II was on sale for less than two years.

The Konan Rapid dial reads B, 1, 1/2, 1/5, 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/250 and 1/500. That is the old sequence. Through the middle and slow end it runs a fraction of a stop off modern values: 1/25 where your meter says 1/30, 1/100 where it says 1/125, 1/5 against 1/4. Pick the nearest marked speed. Negative film shrugs off anything inside half a stop.

No meter, of any kind. No flash sync is documented for the II either, so treat it as a daylight and window-light camera. Age is the other catch. A leaf shutter more than seventy years old often runs slow at 1/2 and a full second until someone cleans it, so budget for a service before you trust the long end. For exposure, take an incident reading at the subject's face with the Zone Light Meter app; it is the meter this body never had.

Who should buy one? Someone who wants the first coated Rokkor on a camera that still takes pictures, and who does not mind doing every step by hand. If knob winding sounds like a chore, look at the IIB, the semi-automatic model that pushed the II off Minolta's price list after twenty-one months. The II is the one to own if what you are after is 1950 itself, the year, by Japanese Wikipedia's account, that a coated lens first went on a Minolta product, on a body you can load with 120 tomorrow morning.