The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month – though left uncelebrated by the inheritors of the Minolta AF legacy, Sony. They have no reason to draw fresh attention to the age of the system, as in four years they have taken it the same sort of distance that Minolta took the world’s first AF system in the late 1980s.

It’s not only Alpha’s 25th birthday. This is also the 25th birthday of modern AF SLR systems – all of them!

This is a multi-page article. See the links at the bottom of the page to Continue Reading after each page.

For Photoclubalpha and the historic Minolta Club of Great Britain, the anniversary does matter. A good many of you out there have been members since the launch of the system, often using the earlier SR and X manual focus systems before that. We still have a 1985 Minolta 7000AF and it’s still working just as it did when new.

25 years before the first Minolta SLRs appeared – a folding Minolta Six of 1935

I don’t mind showing my age to make a comparison. I was 11 in 1963 when I took my first pictures with an SLR camera. My father had bought himself a Pentax S3 – and the camera it replaced was 25 years old, a pre-war Zeiss Ikon Kolibri collapsible 16-on-127 model.

When the Kolibri was made, 127 was the ‘vest pocket’ format of choice. 35mm was on the rise, but 35mm SLRs had not yet arrived. They were as much a thing of the future as digital SLRs were when the Minolta 7000AF was launched.

But within that 25 years, there was hardly a single camera system made with interchangeable lenses that did not become obsolete. Only the ‘frozen assets’ of the cold war kept some systems, like the Exakta bayonet and the Praktina, alive. New brands were launched, from the British Wrayflex and Periflex to the Italian Rectaflex and many German oddities. It was not unusual for an entire system to be come and gone within a few years.

Even in the following quarter-century, the high years of the Japanese 35mm SLR, the succession of lens mount changes was bewildering. Independent lens makers like Tamron and Sigma were forced to make systems using interchangeable mounts not just because the public wanted it. A dozen or more mounts were made for every lens and in the 42mm screw thread fit alone there were endless variants – Praktica LLC (Pentacon Electric), Olympus FTL, Pentax ES and more.

It was more or less a 25-year cycle – the SR system was announced in 1958, and really got underway by 1960. It was to be another quarter century before the AF system arrived. We are now a further 25 years on – can we expect a totally new camera system, once again, in 2010?

Minolta’s SR bayonet mount, introduced in 1958/9, actually remained basically unchanged all the way through to 2005 when the last manual focus model, the X-370S, was available. It survives even now as a mount popular in China where the Seagull range from Shanghai Optical includes Minolta fit models. That mount only ever had one major revision, to add a linkage for open aperture TTL metering. The introduction of programmed exposure and shutter priority was cleverly enabled by using the existing design of lens mechanism and improving its accuracy, while adding a simple reference lug to the ƒ-stop setting ring.

Nikon’s 1959 F-mount proved similarly easy to improve without any basic modification. Both these bayonet mounts celebrated half a century of production in 2008/9 – another landmark, which Nikon was able to celebrate but Minolta of course could not.

The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month.

We have a full length revision of the article which appears in the latest Photoworld now online as a page here.

Read our 25th birthday review of the Alpha system’s history now!

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We now have two ways to delivery Photoworld to you digitally. The Buy Now buttons below give you a download link to a high quality fine screen resolution PDF compendium (one year per $3 download). This is iPad friendly, of course also computer-friendly on all platforms, requires Adobe Acrobat or any PDF reader and can be printed out.

Buy the complete latest four editions – 112 pages from Autumn 2009 to Summer 2010 as a digital download Adobe PDF file – $3! This deal includes the 25th Anniversary of the Alpha System special edition, the Alpha 550 launch and tests, and the NEX launch and tests! An amazing year for Alpha, plus some really superb features from our experts and readers. High quality PDFs you can view on large screens at high res, or print out. This is a 34Mb download with four entire A4 size issues in one ‘book’. Click link below.

Get the Autumn 2008-Summer 2009 full year, over 100 pages including the important Alpha 900 launch and test reports as well as the 230, 330, 380 series. $3 for your iPad-friendly PDF, just add it to your iTunes Bookstore and read at leisure with great full size images and super-clear text! Click link below.

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Our YUDU subscriptions and back issue archive – access all back issues in web Flash reader form for £10 ($15 approx) – plus the next year’s on publication

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Photoclub Alpha’s Photoworld quarterly magazine is now available as an on-line subscription without printed paper issues (you can print any pages you want from the Flash-viewable ‘book reader’ format editions, read on-line, or download to read when you like). The cost is just £10.00 per year and gets you the latest issue before it even reaches our susbcribers!

In addition to 150 pages of tests, reviews and articles from our other magazines we have added five editions of MINOLTA IMAGE from 2002-2004 taking the archive back to December 2002 with 29 editions of the club magazine available to read. Your £10 now gets you over 1,000 pages right away.

You don’t even have to keep checking the site, you are sent an email anytime we add a new edition – or add to our archive of back issues. Already there are 24 issues of Photoworld covering from Spring 2004 to Summer 2010 – the entire history of the Alpha digital system from the Konica/Minolta merger onwards. That’s over 750 A4 pages of digital-era reviews, news, tests, portfolios, galleries, how-to-do-it and inspirational articles!

To preview what’s on offer (see the covers, contents page and first couple of pages of each magazine free) click the link then click any cover thumbnail. You’ll get a preview of a few pages, and the choice of a full subscription or the single issue price of £3. If you pay for the full digital subscription all the issues are unlocked including the next year’s new issues, and each archive edition as we add them.

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“The best ten quid of any Minolta/Sony owner’s money has to be on YUDU, right now. I have just paid (through PayPal) and have access to every copy (it seems) of Photoworld magazine from early 2004. That’s 19 editions and the on-screen presentation is fantastic, not to mention the opportunity to download and read offline. I love magazines, I especially love photography magazines, and to be able to read the back catalogue of Photoworld is an absolute steal for that price.” - Brian Young

Postal subscription only Paypal options

You can subscribe to the printed edition as well using our online Paypal subscription service. Please note that due to problems with forwarding addresses, and notifying us of cancellations or renewals, we are no longer offering new ‘Print and Digital’ combined subscriptions through YUDU.

UK subscriptions are posted by 2nd class Press-stream. Every highly collectible issue is printed on heavy gloss art paper, full colour, printed sheetfed litho with a fine screen to allow the full detail of pictures to be studied. Photoworld is one of the longest-running photo enthusiast brand user magazines in the world, started in 1966 and published by the present editors since 1981 (known from 1982 to 2004 as Minolta Image).

You may also subscribe to a digitally-published version on YUDU, on an annual basis. This includes over 1,000 pages in total with 28 back issues and many additional articles. Go to: Digital Subscription page

There is an open Gallery you can submit images to, and every edition features tests or reviews of the latest equipment along with articles by professional and enthusiast Alpha system and vintage Minolta users.

“The current Photoworld copy I received yesterday again is of outstanding quality. It is easily the thinnest magazine I read in terms of mm width, yet content and printing quality are reason for great delight. The printing is so much better then any of the magazines for sale in Germany, it is breathtaking every time.” - Markus Spring

Photograph by Paul Murphy – cover of Issue No 1 2010, the 25th Anniversary of the Alpha system.

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