Minolta XE-5

Minolta and Leitz spent the early 1970s working together, and the XE body is what came out of it. Minolta built the XE-7 in 1974 as their flagship electronic SLR, and that same chassis later became the basis for the Leica R3, which is most of why these cameras feel the way they do. The XE-5, arriving in 1975, is the stripped-down sibling of the flagship: the same mechanism, fewer features in the finder, a lower price. It sat in the SR-mount line before the XD arrived and pushed Minolta toward multi-mode automation.

The film advance is the thing people remember. The lever travels with a damped, fluid stroke that few cameras of the era matched, and the mirror returns quietly enough that you forget how much it just did. This is the Copal-Leitz CLS, a vertical-travel metal-blade focal-plane shutter, electronically timed, running from a long 4 seconds out to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/90. The note is soft and low rather than a slap. That mechanical refinement is most of why the body still has a following.

It is an aperture-priority automatic. You set the f-stop and the meter picks the shutter speed, shown by a needle against a vertical scale on the right side of the finder. This is where the XE-5 differs from the XE-7: it shows you the metered speed, but it does not display your selected shutter speed in manual mode, and it does not flag A, B, or X in the finder, so you lower the camera to check those. The screen is typically a split-image rangefinder spot ringed by a microprism collar, the standard focusing aid of the era and an easy one to nail. The center-weighted CdS meter reads honestly in even light. The body is dense metal, heavy in the hand in the way these mid-70s Minoltas tend to be.

The honest weakness is battery dependence, with one caveat. Lose the cell and you still have a mechanical 1/90 (the X setting) and B, but every other speed and the meter go dark. The metering circuit was also designed around the steady voltage of mercury cells that are no longer made, so a body that has not been adjusted can read a fraction of a stop off. And the averaging meter gets fooled by a bright sky behind your subject, the way every center-weighted finder meter of the period does.

That last problem is the one worth planning around. For a backlit portrait or a high-contrast street scene, take a spot or incident reading with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows on the zone you want, and set the aperture from that instead of letting the body average its way out. The XE-5 will expose to whatever you dial in.

Today it sits in the affordable-classic bracket, cross-shopped against the Minolta XD-11 and the Olympus OM-2, both of which add shutter-priority or program modes. People who pick the XE-5 over those are usually after the wind stroke and the shutter feel, plus the savings over the XE-7 it descends from. Pair it with the Rokkor primes that came up alongside it and you have a genuinely pleasant manual-focus 35mm camera for not much money.