Alpha Silver Jubilee – 25 years 1985-2010

The simple si?

The 700si won the European Camera of the Year Award for 1994-5. Teamed up with the new Program Flash 5400 (HS) which replaced the 5400xi wireless system flagship, the camera could synchronise flash up to 1/8,000th. The xi power zoom and APZ disappeared, but the Creative Expansion Card slot remained. The 700si was the most advanced SLR of its time and class, but two later si models caught imagination better.

It’s really a 600si, but in Japan it became the Alpha 507si. Maybe six was not auspicious at the time – or maybe Canon’s use of 6xx model numbers for the EOS range influenced local naming. Doesn’s seem to have bothered Sony with the 450, or Canon with the 7D…

The ‘Classic’ 600si abandoned control via top plate LCDs and button presses, replacing these with physical dials and knobs. The idea was that this camera should look and feel more like a manual focus SLR, and overcome the complaints from those who disliked the electronic interface.

So ugly it could almost be a Canon! The bulky butch 800si, with rather obvious studio flash terminal and the most powerful camera top flash ever grafted into an SLR body.

The 800si was an ugly brute, due to the inclusion of the highest powered built in flash ever fitted to an SLR. It was also very ruggedly built and had some professional level features. But once again, there was no immediate replacement for the pro 9 series in the ‘hundred si’ range.

The 505si and the improved 505si Super were the first ultra-compact SLRs benefiting from new construction methods associated with the opening of the Malaysian camera and optical assembly plant. The QTsi (‘cutsie’) was an even smaller precursor of the later minimal models.

The 505 body also saw the first significant digital conversion (partly because Agfa bought into this project, and marketed it as the ActionCam). The Minolta RD175 was arguably better than Nikon or Kodak DSLRs of the same period. Take a look at a write-up by my friend and colleague John Henshall – //www.epi-centre.com/reports/9605cs.html. Sadly, I was no longer working with John when the 175 appeared, having switched magazine horses a year earlier, or I’d have done some great full page repros!

The peak of perfection

That came in 1997 with the Dynax 9. It is hard to explain in 2010 just how exceptional this camera was. I took a Dynax 9 to test for a day’s shoot in Barcelona along with the Canon EOS 1n and the Nikon F5.

In fact, the 9 did not offer anything more than the 9xi had five years earlier – the same 1/12,000th shutter and 1/300th flash sync for example. But it had the best viewfinder of all the big three pro cameras, and used along with the fairly new G series lenses such as the 17-35mm ƒ3.5 it gave me results which were better.

Vertical grip attached, the Dynax 9 actually contained not much more technically than the Dynax 9xi. But it’s here that you can begin to see the design ancestry of the Alpha 700 and 900.

The Dynax 9 (in Europe – Alpha 9 in Japan) came with an ambitious plan to support professionals with a five-year warranty across the entire EU regardless of where purchased, and a network of service centres with loan cameras.

As with so many of Minolta’s attempts to capture the professional’s interest it came to nothing. To make matters worse, a new semi-pro Dynax 7 appeared two years later which added functions the owners of 9s envied. The built-in data recording system had a computer which could also calculate depth of field and use near and far AF points to set the optimum focus. This was something the old Creative Expansion Card system offered, and which Canon had built into their system after a similar experiment (cameras with a barcode reader and expansion cards consisting of a printed barcode).

Cutaway graphic of the Dynax 7. This was an odd period for Minolta publicity. They had just done a decade with the world’s worst press release photos, either over-retouched and perfect, or dull grey snaps on old sheets of paper. Suddenly they produced a superb press pack – which contained not ONE straightforward image of the camera…

Worse still, with the Dynax 7 came a new use for the eight-pin lens mount. SuperSonicMotor focusing (SSM) did away with the use of the noisy if fast AF coupling between body and lens. It brought a few Minolta lenses into the same league as Canon’s mid-1990s introduction of UltraSonicMotor (USM) lenses. The first SSM designs included the 300mm ƒ2.8 APO G and a brand new 70-200mm ƒ2.8 APO G zoom.

The Dynax 9 was unable to use SSM lenses without a service modification, and owners had to decide whether to part with their beloved camera even if they did not yet have an SSM lens. For the next few years – until the merger of Minolta with Konica in 2004 – those selling used Dynax 9 bodies needed to check whether they had done the upgrade, and get it (no longer free) before putting cameras on the market.

Every Minolta and Konica Minolta SLR body made after the Dynax 7 was compatible with SSM. The 7 also marked the transfer of camera manufacture to Malaysia, along with many lenses. The 9 remained hand-built in Japan, but the 7 was no longer a Japanese made body.

The Dynax 5 – Malaysian cooking, Japanese recipe, and a a chiselled-down body contour which looked progressively more plasticky as variants on this new small style appeared.

The Dynax 5, the smallest fully featured SLR yet made by Minolta, took some of the AF improvements made in the 7 and continued a trend towards reducing size and weight above all else. The new all-plastic construction was not inspiring, and the later Dynax 60 (with a superior 9-point AF system as now found on the digital SLRs) was rarely seen as a ‘better’ camera than the 5 even though it was.

The 3, 4, 3L and 40 were all at entry level – similar or even more basic in their way than the earlier models such as the 3xi or the SPxi, a wonderful little camera from the xi period which featured spot metering as a special selling point. By the early 2000s it was beginning to look as if any kind of technical selling point was misplaced – though Minolta continued to include a spot metering mode in basic models right to the end, when other makers abandoned it.