Photoclubalpha

With pocket-change I won a "junk-drawer" e-bay auction which included a Minolta Hi-Matic 11. It has a dented filter ring--dented enough that it will not accept 55mm filters but will still accept 55mm lens-caps. The lens does not appear to have suffered any damage, but is dirty;the front surface cleaned up easily but the rear is still dusty. Without loading film into it and finding a forty year-old battery, it seems as if all its mechanicals still work, including focus, self-timer, film advance and winder, and leaf shutter. The body is mostly clean, having been stored in its leather case, but has a few grimy spots under the film advance lever and in the hot-shoe.

So what do you do with an old, possibly busted, rangefinder? For the cost of powering it and supplying and developing film, I could probably find another that had the seller's guarantee that it's working. I suppose it looks good on a shelf...

You leave it on the parcel shelf of your car and then set yourself up with a video camera to catch some shots of thieves without any knowledge of photography smashing your car window to steal something with zero street value. Then you give the video to the cops. This is genuine 'You've Been Framed' shooting

David

I think it depends on your car insurance policy .

I wonder if you could convince the under-writer that the modern equvalent replacement range finder would be something like the Leica M9?

Looks like I found someone to buy it at work, and I'll turn a slight profit, too. Total auction with shipping came to $13.60. After a little cleaning it looks like a respectable $20 paperweight (at worst), or a trip down memory lane for an older fellow with a PX625 battery.

For my SRT I bought a 1.55v new battery and a wein 1.3v battery for replacemnt of the nerc cell. there was and is no diference in metering between the 2 and they both agree with the meter on my A700 and X700

Got a tidy $20 for it. Without the bent filter ring I could probably have asked for $30 or $40 in good conscience. Considering it would have cost me more than $20 to discover whether the camera still worked, I feel pretty good about the deal.

I have one of those. I bought my Hi-Matic 11 new for my wife to try to get her into 35mm photography. It was a neat camera that took great pictures. It was auto exposure with shutter priority and had a split image rangefinder. It was quick and fun to use. Only down side was that you could take pictures with the lens cap on.

If Sony made a digital rangefinder like this at a reasonable price, I would buy it.

Do you mean a II or a Hi-Matic 7S MkII? The 7S II remains one of the best rangefinders ever made, of its period. I don't think we are ever likely to see anything exactly similar, but a Ricoh GR Digital is a fairly close match.

David

AlphaDSLR would seem to be describing the Hi-Matic 11 in my estimation. The one I briefly owned fits the description, anyway, right down to the shutter priority. It had a neat window in the corner of the viewfinder that let you see the selected shutter speed from the lens barrel. The downside was that the Hi-Matic 11 was basically a Hi-Matic 9 without full-manual control. It was a handsome camera, anyway, and I probably would have kept it if I didn't already have a Uniomat (no battery necessary!).