What happened to Minolta, and the camera that outlived it

October 30, 2026|Toni

Black Minolta Maxxum 7000 SLR from 1985, seen from the front left, with the AF 35-70mm zoom lens and hood on a white background

January 19, 2006. Konica Minolta publishes two short statements on its website. The first says the group will leave the camera business by March 31. The second hands what is left of it to Sony.

That was the end of Minolta as a camera maker, 78 years after Kazuo Tashima started the company. The question is why a brand that built the first serious autofocus SLR, the 7000 of 1985, could not survive the cameras that followed it. The answer runs through one camera, one courtroom and one merger.

Maker: Minolta, from 2003 Konica Minolta
Years: 1928 to March 31, 2006 for cameras
Founder: Kazuo Tashima
Flagship: the 7000 of 1985, sold as the α-7000 in Japan, Maxxum 7000 in the U.S. and Minolta 7000 in Europe
What lives on: the lens mount the 7000 introduced, carried on by Sony from 2006

What happened to Minolta: the statement

The January 2006 release is plain. Konica Minolta would withdraw from cameras, film and digital, by March 31, 2006. In its own words, "we came to the conclusion that it was best to transfer assets concerning camera business to Sony."

The numbers explain the tone. In the year to March 2005, the camera business had net sales of 117 billion yen and an operating loss of 7.3 billion yen. The photo business, film and paper, lost money too. The group planned to cut 3,700 jobs from a workforce of 33,000 by September 2007.

Color film and paper would stop by the end of March 2007. All photo sales would end by September 30, 2007. From April 1, 2006, Sony would service Konica, Minolta and Konica Minolta cameras. A second release added the detail that mattered most to owners. Sony would receive the assets to build digital SLRs for the Maxxum and Dynax lens mount.

A German-Japanese camera store

The company began in 1928. According to Digital Camera World, Tashima founded it as Nichidoku Shashinki Shōten. The name translates as Japan-German Camera Company. Its first camera, the Nifcarette, used a German lens and shutter.

The Minolta name followed in 1931. The same account reads it as an acronym: Mechanism, INstruments, Optics and Lenses by TAshima. It is a neat story. The source here is a magazine, not a company document from 1931, so read it as the story the brand tells.

By the 1960s, Minolta had a place in the space program. Konica Minolta's own timeline says a Minolta Hi-Matic flew on Friendship 7 in 1962. That is the camera John Glenn used to photograph Earth, sold in the U.S. under the Ansco name, and its story is in the Journal. The same timeline says NASA asked for a Minolta exposure meter, the Space Meter, on Apollo 8 and Apollo 11.

The 7000, and a camera that focused itself

The flagship came in 1985. Konica Minolta's timeline calls the α-7000 an SLR with professional-grade autofocus and says it was reportedly the first of its kind. Sony, which later inherited the system, describes it as the first full-scale 35mm autofocus SLR, developed over more than four years.

Both phrasings are careful for a reason. Nikon had shown an autofocus F3 in 1983, according to camera-wiki. The 7000 was different in where it put the work. The focus sensor sat in the body, and the lenses carried chips that talked to the camera. A built-in motor wound the film.

Close view of the top of a black Minolta Maxxum 7000 with its small LCD panel, two blue up and down buttons, the shutter release and the red AF window under the 7000 badge — Top plate of the Maxxum 7000: an LCD panel and push buttons where earlier SLRs had dials. "Controls on right top of Minolta Maxxum 7000", Michael Holley, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

It changed how an SLR looked. Dials gave way to buttons and a small LCD panel. The body was largely plastic composite. The usual kit lens was a 35-70mm f/4 zoom, which doubled as the focus ring in macro mode. The 7000 won the Japan Camera Grand Prix in 1985.

The price of progress was the mount. Konica Minolta's 2020 note on the camera says the mount was redesigned, so earlier Minolta lenses would not fit. Owners of manual-focus Minoltas, such as the X-700, had to start again. According to camera-wiki, Minolta autofocus cameras led the market for a couple of years.

Back of a black Minolta Maxxum 7000 on a white background, showing the MODE and DRIVE buttons, hot shoe, LCD panel, film window and a neck strap — The back of the Maxxum 7000, with MODE and DRIVE buttons beside the hot shoe. "Minolta Maxxum 7000 35mm SLR back", Michael Holley, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The patent that came first

Here is the twist. The first camera that focused itself was not a Minolta at all. Konica Minolta's own history names the Konica C35 AF of 1977 as the first autofocus camera. Its focusing module came from Honeywell, a Minneapolis company better known for thermostats.

Honeywell had no camera of its own, so it licensed the idea. When the Maxxum line launched in January 1985, Honeywell's lawyers said Minolta had taken its patents. The suit was filed in 1987.

The verdict came on February 7, 1992. After six and a half days, a federal jury found that Minolta had infringed three of four Honeywell patents. It also found one of those three invalid, and the infringement not willful. The award was $96.35 million.

Honeywell's chief financial officer, Christopher Steffen, did not hold back. "This is a victory for America, that piracy of our intellectual technology will not be tolerated," he said, according to the Deseret News. The judge, Alfred M. Wolin, said he did not believe trade tension between the U.S. and Japan had affected the case.

The case settled weeks later for $127.5 million, including interest. That figure comes from the Christian Science Monitor and from Honeywell's own trial lawyers. Camera-wiki gives $127.6 million, so accounts differ slightly. The same lawyers say Honeywell went on to recover about $500 million from other camera makers.

Digital Camera World calls the award a blow that helped push Minolta toward a merger. In 2003, Minolta joined Konica, the company whose C35 AF had used the Honeywell module first.

Two digital SLRs, then Sony

The merged company sold only two SLRs under its own name, the Maxxum 7D and 5D of 2004. According to Digital Camera World, they were the first SLRs to stabilize the image inside the body.

Sony had been developing digital SLRs with Konica Minolta since July 2005. In June 2006, at Omotesando Hills in Tokyo, it showed its first one, the Alpha DSLR-A100. The Japan Times reported that its mount accepted most Konica Minolta lenses. Sales in Japan started on July 21.

Black Minolta 7000 with a zoom lens and hood, standing on a wooden bench, seen from the front left — A Minolta 7000 on a bench. The mount behind that lens is the one Sony took over in 2006. "Minolta Maxxum 7000 Alpha Mount", MIKI Yoshihito, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Sony's executive vice president, Yutaka Nakagawa, set the goal at the launch: "we hope to secure a position as the leading camera maker." The ambition was Sony's. The lens mount, and the Greek letter on the box, were Minolta's.

What lives on, and why collectors look for it

Sony still tells the story that way. Its own Alpha history page begins with the α-7000 of 1985, not with a Sony. The name Minolta disappeared from new cameras in 2006. The system it started did not.

Japan noticed too. In 2020, the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo registered the Minolta 7000 as an Essential Historical Material for Science and Technology. Konica Minolta described it as a product that changed the mainstream of 35mm SLRs at once.

For a collector, the 7000 is the starting point of autofocus as it is used today. It is also a clean break. Most lenses made for it fit the A-mount bodies that followed, while the manual-focus Minolta lenses before it do not. That line, drawn in 1985, is the most useful fact to know when putting a Minolta system together.

The January 2006 statement ended a company. It did not end the camera that started the trouble. You can browse all 35mm film cameras in the shop, or read how Contax ended a year earlier.