Good evening from Cambridgeshire.

[Cogito]

Good evening all - well it is here in the Fenlands!
I have read David Kilpatrick's posts in another forum and since noticing his enforced absence there, thought I'd look elsewhere!
'Here' wasn't too dificult to find!
I bought my first Minolta SLR in about 1980. That was an aperture priority model that came with a 45mm f2 lens.
Can't remember the model number. I sold and bought my way up to an XM which I still have and use occasionally, plus an XE1 as backup. Never progressed to an auto-focus model....
I also bought a 16mm MG-S and still have a large number of negatives from this really quite good camera. But no camera anymore......
Come the digital age, my first camera was an Epson 850Z, then a Minolta 7HI then a Leica Digilux 2. I still own the Leica and am still impressed with its image quality!
These were followed by trips back in time - a Minolta RD 3000 and a KM Dimage A2. Still have them both and they also get used!
My - so far - final purchase has been a KM Dynax 7D which I use with a Tamron 18-250 and a Sigma 10-20 lens - together with my MC/MD lenses which work perfectly well on the 7D!hiccup! I especially like using the 50mm macro with or without the 1:1 extension tube - a nice focal length on the digital and still very clean and sharp.
I use both Lightroom and RawTherapee to process my images 99% of which are shot as RAW.
I'm now going to have a look at the postings here... Could be a long (and I hope informative) read.

[Dr. Harout]

Informative it is.
I always enjoy DK's articles.

[David Kilpatrick]

Your camera with the 45mm f2 lens was probably an XG1, XG9 or XG7 - one of the XG models. This lens was very good indeed. The XG series differed from the XD range by having a polycarbonate body shell, very similar to the Canon AE-1. They also used CdS metering rather than the faster Silicon Cell metering, and were Aperture priority not multi mode. It can be interesting to buy 'recently discontinued' technology while it is still supported enough to be useful. The RD3000 is especially interesting as the image quality is much higher than people would assume for 2.7 megapixels - it was easily a match for the early Nikon and Canon models.

David