Minolta XE-7: The Beautiful and Damned

My XE-7, featuring a broken self-timer. Who needs selfies anyway?

In the analog world of the forgotten and obsolete, there are some that are more forgotten and obsolete than others.

Enter the now-defunct Minolta brand of cameras. Once the darlings of the consumer and prosumer market, the undisputed masters of the perennial sleeper camera, now mergered with Konica to make Konica-Minolta, a shadow of its former self. Such was its fall from grace that it couldn't even get the first name in the merger.

Times have changed, as all film enthusiasts know, but even though some brand's old film classics have seen a sort of renaissance (Canon, Nikon), there are others who have been left as a relic of the Dark Ages (Minolta, Yashica, etc.) Yes, there is the Minolta X-700 (a now-popular choice for the beginning film enthusiast) and the beloved, classic SRT series, but there are more in the Minolta lineup that are yet to have their days in the sun.

Being fascinated by the underdogs of the 35mm world (and also spurned on by my extremely limited budget and crack cocaine-like addiction to film), I started to become interested in Minolta. I owned a Nikon F3, but lens prices rose to a point where I could not justify building an entire system around it, so I wanted to go cheaper, but with the same feature set and build quality. I searched high and low for something that could possibly equal my Nikon, even slightly, but I concluded that the F3 was as good as it got for me.

Then came the XE-7.

Tempted by the Fruit of Another

This black beauty came along with its aperture priority CLC metering (the same in the SRT-101), its silky smooth advance lever (on par with the F3, if you can believe it), its burly but elegant form factor, and Leica in its pedigree. As soon as I saw it I had to have it and for the princely sum of $20, this XE-7 was mine.

Mostly metal in its construction (viewfinder housing is plastic), everything on it clicks and whirrs smooth as butter, and it's simply luxurious to hold and use. The shutter is absolute heaven, a joint design from Copal and Leitz themselves, with one of the lowest shutter lag times in any SLR. It's startling how quickly it fires and how smoothly it moves. There's no mirror lockup to be had here but, using it, you could see why Minolta didn't think it necessary.

Transhumanism, brought to you by Minolta. (source: James Eckberg on flickr)

Even the switches that unlock many of the buttons are some of the smoothest and well placed i've ever encountered. The buttons are located strategically on the sides of the dials instead of the top, facilitating single finger control. You can flick from manual to auto mode effortlessly, something I wish more camera makers could replicate. Even changing exposure compensation is easy, something not too many cameras are adept at. You can flick up two clicks for +2 and down two clicks for -2. Easy peasy.

Aperture-priority, easy manual control, a hell of a shutter, and a design from (or at least approved by) the hallowed city of Wetzlar. All of this combined in the gestalt product of the XE-7 makes for a singularly effortless picture-taking experience. Running my first roll through it, I could scarcely believe I hit the last frame. And when I got home, I looked back at my F3 with guilt and shame because for the first time, there was another camera in my life.
Somebody's Baby

I picked them both up and to my surprise there were a startling number of similarities between them. Aperture-priority mode was located nearly identically on the dial, there was a viewfinder blind and a multiple exposure lever in the exact same places, and the advance lever was particularly smooth between both (legendarily so in the F3). They were both all black, extremely reliable, and even shared the same grandiose elegance in their form factors (these aren't small cameras). I realized that the F3 was essentially the XE-7 for the 80's, with the F3 soaking up all the glory in the pages of NatGeo while the XE-7 went gently into that good night of the box next to grandpa's 70's porn mags.

Don't You Forget About Me

Luckily for us, those boxes have been emptied out into flea markets, auction sites, and your local listings. Luckier still are we to see people fawning over AE-1 Programs, FE's, FM's, and even the nostalgia trip that is the K1000, biting off seller's hands for these while leaving Minoltas to the side for the lucky, possibly unwitting buyer to have. And of these forgotten cameras the XE-7, for me, sits at the top. Its reliability while being semi-automated edges every other Minolta camera made for me, even the venerated SRT's and, in my opinion, the next evolution of this camera, the XD-11. This is Minolta's masterpiece and I suggest that if you ever run into one, try it, and try not to fall in love. I dare you.

Someday (and I think it'll be soon), people will sit up and recognize this as being on par with the more popular offerings, and i'll be in the same place, scrounging up money for a new lens, cursing my fate as I have missed the wave of cheap camera equipment again. Minolta will again have its day in the sun, and people will revere these amazing machines and their almost unbeatable glass as they once did. But for right now, the Minolta XE-7 stands as one of the beautiful, but ultimately, damned.