Minolta 7s With Kodak 800
The Minolta 7s rangefinder has a bright 45mm f1.8 lens built with 6 elements. While it has an electronic shutter I much prefer to use it in full manual operation where a 1.35V battery isn’t even required. That being said the aperture and shutter speed are set using two narrow rings on the lens barrel. They are adjacent to each other so care needs to be taken when changing the exposure. The side benefit of this arrangement and its reason is so that you can change both values in step keeping the same exposure while changing the shutter speed and aperture much like a modern Program mode. The shutter on the Himatic 7s sounds like it’s capable of chopping vegetables but they also appear to be extremely reliable ( I do not recall coming across any of these cameras with a stuck shutter). The viewfinder is bright and large and the framing lines move with focus to adjust for parallax. The one big knock on the Himatic 7s is its size and weight it’s a beast weighing in at 720grams and a full inch wider than a Himatic E or F. When you read out something like an inch wider it doesn’t sound like that much but in practice that is a huge difference.
For this roll of Kodak 800 I pushed the limits of this camera, shooting a series of nocturnes under very low levels of illumination. The shutter only goes down to 1/4 of a second but even at this speed some form of support is required to limit the amount of blur induced. Again shooting in manual mode allows full control over exposure and really I’m not confident that the light meter of this or any camera from 1966 can deal with this low a light level.
For some daylight photography and a better idea of what this camera can produce Minolta Himatic 7s
