Old “Circle and Needle” metering manual cameras (Minolta SRT’s among them) were built to run on a 1.35 volt mercury battery. Mercury is very poisonous, and mercury batteries are now illegal. The replacement alkaline batteries in those same sizes are all 1.5 volts. The extra voltage makes the light meter oversensitive, and all the pictures… Read More »
Q: It looks like Imight have to start photographing some old buildings, and since I’ll be traveling/walking a lot, I’d like to carry a single lens. I don’t want the buildings to look any more crooked than they actually are! Any suggestions? I don’t know if this is possible, but… Try to get a ways… Read More »
Glass is the most important part of taking pictures (well, aside from the photographer). Everything else just supports it. The 9 won’t get you better pictures (in all but a few, extreme circumstances). The 200 2.8 will, especially 8×10 inch prints.
Aw, come on. The lens is way heavier than the body! (I’m serious!) I should point out, however, that the relative weight of the lens and body are irrelivant to focus speed. Important are the power and speed of the motor driving the AF, and the weight of the element that needs to be moved… Read More »
I got my pictures back from a used Minolta HiMatic. It is hard to believe that a $17.00, 38-year old camera can produce such exceptional image quality. It is also very hard to believe how consistently “dead on” the exposure was… especially when you consider that this thing has no “computer” inside and doesn’t even… Read More »
Bokeh refers to how the lens, based on its design, renders the out of focus areas. Logically, no lens test chart will measure this, since they are made by focusing on a two dimensional chart. These two dimensional charts are great for sharpness and distortion, but tell us nothing of how the out-of-focus areas will… Read More »
You have forgotton the very basic limitation of the lens vs. the eye. If you look a a scene that includes both background and foreground, your eye focuses first on one, then on the other. (More specifically, you usually use both eyes look at the scene). This is what you see. Now, when you attempt… Read More »
Well, as far image quality goes, the Cosina (Tamron) does pretty poorly aginst the Minolta (MTF 0.9 vs 3.8 – the scale is 1-5). Speed, well… Since the Minolta is older and heavier, it is slower to focus. Some bodies you will hardly notice the difference, other bodies, there will be a more noticeable difference.