Minolta X-300

This is the camera Minolta built for people who could not afford the X-700, and it turned out to be most of what the X-700 was. Aperture priority, a clean LED viewfinder readout, the full Minolta SR lens mount, and a price that has stayed low for forty years. People sometimes call it the poor man's X-700, which is true and also slightly unfair, because the thing that got cut was mostly program mode and a couple of buttons. The picture-taking part is the same.

You set an aperture on the lens, the body picks the shutter speed, and a column of red LEDs down the right side of the finder tells you what it chose. The finder is bright and uncluttered, with a horizontal split-prism in the center for fast focusing and a microprism collar around it. The shutter runs from a long 4 seconds out to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and it is the quiet electronic kind, more of a soft clack than a slap. Loading is ordinary 35mm, drop the leader on the take-up spool and close the back. Build is mostly polycarbonate over a metal chassis, so it feels lighter than the all-brass bodies and a little less precious. That is the point. You can throw it in a bag.

The catch, and it is the famous one with this whole family of Minoltas, is that the camera is fully battery dependent. Two LR44 cells run everything, and when they die the shutter dies with them. There is no mechanical backup speed, no emergency 1/100, nothing. A cold day with weak batteries means a dead camera. The other thing worth knowing is that these bodies can suffer a capacitor failure that kills the shutter so it will not fire, fixable but annoying, so a working one that has been left alone is a good sign.

Who shoots it now: students and people getting back into film who want autoexposure without paying X-700 money. The Minolta SR mount, also called MC and MD depending on the era, is one of the great bargains in used glass. The Rokkor 50mm f/1.7 that usually comes bolted to the front is sharp and costs almost nothing, and the wider Rokkors are some of the most underpriced fast lenses you can buy. Cross-shoppers usually look at the Pentax K1000 or the Canon AE-1 Program. The K1000 wins on battery independence, the X-300 wins on a nicer finder and aperture priority that actually works well in changing light.

The center-weighted meter is good but it averages, so it gets fooled by the usual traps. Backlight, a bright sky over a dark subject, a stage spot in a dark room. For those, pull a reading from the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want your shadows to land on, and dial in exposure compensation or switch to manual to honor it. The body's automation is convenient for everything else, which is exactly why this camera has lasted. It gets out of the way.