Will Konica Lenses work on a Sony Alpha DSLR?

By | September 20, 2009

No. The confusion comes from the corporate history of Minolta, Konica, and Sony. Back in the 1980’s Konica and Minolta were separate companies with separate, incompatible camera systems. Sometime after 2000 Minolta bought Konica, but by that time Konica had long discontinued its cameras, and made mostly film and specialty devices (like copiers and printers). Minolta renamed itself “Konica Minolta” but the cameras sold as “Konica Minolta” cameras were made were backwards compatible only with Minolta Maxxum mount lenses. Then in 2006 “Konica Minolta” sold its entire camera business to Sony, so what had been the (Konica) Minolta Maxxum system is now the Sony Alpha system.

Sony bought Minolta’s camera business to compete with Nikon and Canon at the high end of the camera market. Sony only entered the camera market with the advent of the point & shoot digital camera, and was very successful. But they had no legacy SLR system, and in the end found it easier to acquire the Maxxum technology than to build an entire SLR system from scratch. The other advantage was the existence of millions of used Minolta Maxxum mount lenses on the used market. People would both want and need a new Sony digital camera body, but could use older Minolta lenses on it. This provided a built-in market for new Sony cameras (people with thousands of dollars of quality Minolta Maxxum lenses would sooner buy a Sony camera than sell everything and switch to Canon or Nikon) and value conscious consumers could buy a Sony body and get inexpensive used Maxxum mount lenses. However, even though Sony bought “Konica Minolta’s” Maxxum mount technology, this had nothing to do with the old Konica mount system. The old Konica mount from the 1980’s remains orphaned, meaning that there is no digital camera on which 1980’s manual focus Konica lenses will work.

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