Jan 23, 2006

For cameras at least…

Digital Photography Review reports that Konica Minolta is getting out of the camera business! I am totally shocked and a bit sad as well.

My first SLR camera was a 35mm Minolta Maxxum 7000i as seen to the left. My Dad bought it for me when I was 16, and I spent almost every dollar I made in High School on lenses, accessories, film and photo processing. In fact, often I had no money to develop the film, but that didn’t stop me from buying and shooting more of it.

The 7000i had an expansion port built into it that would accept little cards about the size of modern day SD Cards. These cards would hold various programs that would make shooting certain kinds of photography easier – like a portrait card and an automatic exposure bracketing card, etc. Today most cameras have these programs built in, but this was a major breakthrough in consumer cameras for the time.

Oddly enough, I used to dream of being able to stick some kind of memory module into that slot so that I could take a picture and have it saved to the module instead of exposing it onto the film. Why? So that I could somehow load it up into my Apple IIgs and print it out on my 8 color Imagewriter II dot-matrix printer! We’re talking back in 1988 – way before I had ever heard of a digital camera. See the crap I invented before it was even invented?? Don’t even get me started on noise cancelling technology…

Anyway – I had actually wanted a different camera to begin with – the Konica FT-1. My mother was working at Konica in the parts department for their copier division at the time, and I begged her to find out what cameras she could get at an employee discount. At first, I didn’t even know that Konica made cameras but a friend told me that his dad had a Konica and that their product was first rate.

My mom brought me back a price list and a bunch of brochures about their equipment and I fell in love with the top of the line, as I usually do. The FT-1 was the badest thing I had ever laid eyes on (this was before I saw the 7000i) – and despite the fact that I had NO clue how to use a manual 35mm, I was convinced that I would die if I didn’t get one.

It was about $800 at the time, if I remember correctly, but I could get it for around $600 with the discount. Then came lenses, etc. Basically I needed a big ‘G’ to cover the bill. With about a tenth of that to my name, I asked my mom to check into the availability – how soon I’d get it, etc and she gave me the horrible news. They had stopped making it the year before, and they had no stock left for sale to employees. They didn’t really have a new model in its class as a replacement, so I was pretty much out of luck.

About 6 months afterwards, I found out that my uncle knew a guy that could get Minolta equipment at the employee price. They had just come out with the 7000i at the time and I was enthralled. It was WAY more than I could afford, but boy could I dream. Then, somehow, my Dad and my Nana decided that they were going to buy it for me for Christmas that year. I was in heaven! It was an awesome camera.

My Maxxum took all the pictures for my High School yearbook, gave me an excuse to study through a lens the woman who would become my wife, took over 1500 pictures of our trip to the holy land and captured thousands of memories over a decade of use. It was my main camera until I finally gave in to the digital bug and bought a Casio 3000EX point and shoot camera in early 2000.

I always missed that 7000i though – the flexibility and creativity of an SLR is far superior to a point and shoot camera and my photographic style was cramped for years. When consumer priced digital SLRs started coming out, I waited patiently for Minolta (then merged with Konica, the very company who started my photo jones) to release a version that would use all the Maxxum lenses that I had acquired over the years, but it just didn’t happen in time.

When we found out that we were expecting a daughter, I bit the bullet and bought a Canon 10D with several lenses, thinking that Minolta would never make the jump. They did about a year later, much to my chagrin. Their foray into the D-SLR field was fairly successful, but I guess it was not successful enough. Sony is acquiring the photo assets of Konica Minolta and will continue to develop for their lens mount, but it just won’t be the same.

I’m a bit sad at loosing, at the same time, both of the companies that turned me on to photography.

So long old buddies, and thanks for the memories…