Minolta X-700

Announced in early 1981 at $399.50 for the body, the X-700 was Minolta's answer to the Canon AE-1 and A-1, and it worked. It became Minolta's best-selling SLR since the SRT range, stayed in production for eighteen years, outlived the company's own move to autofocus, and was the last manual-focus body Minolta made. It also introduced the Rising Sun logo. It sat between the professional XD series above and the consumer XG series below. The genuinely interesting story is a cost decision. Bodies with serial numbers below two million were built with tantalum capacitors, which are expensive and effectively never fail. Somewhere in the mid-eighties Minolta switched to much cheaper electrolytics, which fail with age. Which means a 1981 X-700 is very often a better buy than a 1990 one, and the serial number tells you more than the cosmetic grade does. Minolta marketed the whole thing as MPS, the Minolta Program System, and the part of it that still impresses is the flash. A silicon cell beside the mirror box reads light bouncing off the film surface during the exposure and cuts the flash the instant enough light has been delivered. Once the flash is charged it tells the camera, and the camera switches itself to the sync speed.

A bright, easy, well-automated manual-focus SLR, and an excellent first film camera. The Acute Matte screen is genuinely bright — brighter than plenty of later cameras. TTL flash that actually works, with the 280PX, 132PX, 360PX and the 80PX ring flash. Access to a very large and still cheap Rokkor lens system, with winders, motor drives, bellows, extension tubes and data backs. All four exposure modes: program, aperture priority, manual and bulb, with exposure compensation to plus or minus two stops and an AE lock. Where it falls short: there is no mechanical shutter speed at all, not even B. A flat battery or a failed capacitor stops the camera dead. Flash sync is 1/60, which limits daylight fill. The meter stops at EV 1, so it is a poor night or astro camera. The body is plastic and vulnerable to impact. There is no shutter priority — the XD-11 has it. And the AE lock shares its switch with the self-timer, so the two cannot be used together, which is a real nuisance on a tripod. On lenses: look for MD lenses, because only those enable program mode, and New MD lenses from 1981 add a minimum-aperture lock that stops the ring being knocked off f/22 — useful precisely because program requires the ring locked at minimum. MC Rokkor lenses meter at full aperture and work in aperture priority and manual, but give no program mode. Older pre-MC lenses lack the coupling entirely.

This is the single most useful thing a buyer can do with an X-700. Below two million means tantalum capacitors, which seldom fail. Above two million means electrolytics, which are prone to it.

Fresh cells. Wind on. Half-press and the viewfinder LEDs should light. Full-press and it must fire. If the LEDs die and nothing happens and the advance lever is now jammed part way through its stroke, that is the capacitor. Do it several times — the failure is often intermittent before it becomes permanent.

A camera that is completely unresponsive on known-good fresh cells, with no LEDs on half-press, is a much worse sign than one whose LEDs light and then die. That points at the electronics rather than a capacitor.

White or green crust. Battery damage to the circuit is one of the things that makes an X-700 unrepairable.

In aperture priority with a lens fitted, rotate the aperture ring through its whole range and watch the indicated shutter speed change smoothly and by the right amount at each stop. Speeds that jump erratically, stick, or ignore a stop point at the simulator.

Open the back and check the channels for black tar. Look up into the mirror box with the lens off for a crumbling or absent bumper strip. A decayed bumper is also the first thing to check on a camera whose mirror sticks up.

The lens must be set to its smallest aperture and locked there. If the ring is not at minimum, program will not work — and that is not a fault.

Most cameras sent for repair are not broken. Put a fresh set in before you conclude anything, and do it before you test any other fault on this page, because tired cells imitate half of them. Use ordinary alkaline cells, not rechargeables. Not because rechargeables damage anything — they do not, and one or two makers supplied their own rechargeable packs — but because of three things that all read as a broken camera. A nickel-metal-hydride cell is 1.2 volts against an alkaline's 1.5, so six of them give 7.2 volts where the camera expects 9. A battery check built for alkalines reads that as flat. A meter calibrated at 1.5 volts reads the light wrong at 1.2. And ordinary rechargeables lose ten to fifteen per cent of their charge every month sitting in a drawer, so a camera used three times a year is dead every time you pick it up, where alkalines lose two or three per cent in a year. If you want rechargeables anyway, use low-self-discharge cells, charge them the week you shoot, and trust the battery check less. Never mix old and new cells, or two chemistries, in one camera. And take them out when you put the camera away: a leaking cell is the commonest way a working camera becomes a dead one.

Cartridges do jam, and it is not always the camera. Shooters have reported cartridges that would not advance in one body and ran perfectly in another, and the same fault following the cartridge rather than the camera across different models. The test takes ten seconds and settles it. Take the cartridge out, mark the film through the front window with a permanent pen, put it back, run the camera two or three seconds, and take it out again. If the mark has gone, the film moved. Three separate labs give that same test. Then swap. Try a different cartridge in the same camera, or the same cartridge in a different camera. One bad roll points at the cartridge. Three bad rolls point at the camera. Things that mislead people: the footage counter can move while the film does not, so it proves nothing on its own. And check each roll reads EXPOSED at the end before you send it off. If it jams, do not open the cartridge. You cannot inspect it without fogging the film, and you destroy both the footage and the evidence. Send it to the lab anyway — they open it in darkness and can often recover what was shot. Kodak runs a feedback form for cartridges, and some sellers will replace a jammed one. One popular explanation is worth correcting: the story that Vision3 stocks jam because their base is thicker, being designed for 16mm and 35mm. Kodak's own data describes the 35mm and Super 8 versions of a stock identically and publishes no base thickness at all. The only documented difference is between negative and reversal film, and the lab that documents it says the thicker negative helps rather than hurts. The jams that are documented were on reversal stock.

The symptom is precise, and it is not what most people expect. Half-press the shutter release and the viewfinder LEDs light. Full-press and the LEDs go out and the shutter does not fire. The film advance lever is then locked solid part way through its stroke, because the shutter is wound but the camera cannot release it. Fresh batteries make no difference. The part is a 220 microfarad 4 volt electrolytic. There are two in an X-700: the shutter-release capacitor on the connector board at the base, which is the one that usually fails, and an aperture-control capacitor under the top cover, which is unique to the X-700 because the X-500 and X-300 have no program mode. It is a capacitor swap, not a scrapped camera. But the boards are very fragile and bad soldering kills them permanently, so for a camera being sold on it is a technician's job. Technicians recommend doing it before it fails rather than after, because a leaked capacitor damages the board underneath and then the repair escalates to replacing the whole flex assembly. One trap for anyone attempting it: on a tantalum capacitor the band marks the positive terminal, which is the opposite of the usual convention, and the two capacitors do not share polarity orientation. One owner who fitted one backwards measured the battery falling from 2.8 volts to 1.3 overnight.

The camera depends on five integrated circuits which are undocumented black boxes. A defective one can only be replaced from an abandoned X-700, and even Minolta's own service workshops replaced whole boards rather than troubleshoot. A capacitor fault is a cheap fix; a failed chip, or a board destroyed by battery leakage or moisture, makes the body a donor.

Six pieces of foam: 1mm in the top and bottom door channels, 1mm in the two back-cover channels, a 2mm mirror cushion and a 2mm hinge seal. The bumper sits recessed and is considerably harder to reach than on the older SRT bodies. The real risk during the job is fragments dropping onto the mirror or the focusing screen. Owners work with cotton swabs lightly dampened with ethanol and bent tweezers, angling the camera forward so debris falls away from the mirror. Removing the old adhesive is the bulk of the work. Seals are a home fix; the recessed bumper is fiddly but doable.

A rotating ring with wipers running on gold-plated tracks. Different aperture positions give different resistances, and the camera reads those as the set f-stop — it is what allows open-aperture metering while keeping the finder bright. What fails is corroded contacts or damaged wipers, not the design. Cleaning them is a technician's job, because it is inside the mirror box area.

Two 1.5 volt alkaline LR44, two 1.55 volt silver-oxide SR44, or one 3 volt lithium CR-1/3N. All three are still made and all three are sanctioned by Minolta's own manual — which tells you the meter is not voltage-critical in the way a sixties camera's is. Do not use rechargeables. Nothing on this camera is mechanical, so a cell that collapses under load stops it outright, and there is no fallback speed to get you home. And take the cells out for storage: battery damage to the circuit is named as one of the causes of unrepairable bodies.

The only documented cause is reversed capacitor polarity after a botched repair, which drops the pack from 2.8 volts to 1.3 in about twelve hours. If a body eats batteries overnight, suspect a previous capacitor repair rather than an inherent design fault.