Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The Leica Mini cost about $300 when it was new while the Minolta Freedom Escort cost about $85 I’ve written previously about how these are for all intents and purposes the same camera.  Fraternal twins? Leica and Minolta

Despite this knowledge the gravitational pull of the Leica still seems to draw me in as it obviously has others.  It’s true Leica have created some incredible photographic equipment and I guess this halo allowed them to charge more for the same thing such as the Leica Digilux 4.3 which was essentially a Fujifilm 4700 or the Leica Digilux 3 which was the same as a Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1 and there were and are more examples.  There is always just enough modification to at least create the plausibility of justification whether it’s the lens or firmware.  In the case of the Leica Mini its the lens that is different but from what I can see there is little or no gain over the Minolta.  See what I just did there?  Even I hedged my bet that there could be a difference, what am I afraid of, the not so secret society the Leicati?   If having a Leica is something that matters to you then this is a good one to have it’s cheap and decent and has a red dot but if you can’t find one you could always just put a red dot on the Minolta.

In response to the uproar over Hasselblads Lunar rebranding of the Sony Nex7 I thought i would point out that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Many cameras have been released under different names. It’s been mentioned on the Internet how many parts the Minolta Freedom Escort and the Leica Mini share but a visual comparison is always nice. (Update the Olympus AF Mini is part of this litter)

Update this post has been sitting written and ready to post for over six months it just got pushed to the back. I could have removed the no longer topical reference to the Hasselblad but that camera is still funny.

Wait it’s triplets!  As Drewboom pointed out to me the Olympus Trip AF Mini was seperated from these two at birth and it definetely shares major parts with its siblings.

As I’ve posted before I like the Leica Mini finding it does a great job as a point and shoot.  I unfortunately used some pretty poor film in it this last time and didn’t really end up with too many keepers.  These four shots are my favorites and stand out from the rest mostly because they turned out.  Note to self outdated  Kodak 400 is to be avoided.

The latest painting in the series.  I suppose I should give the series an actual name.  Until then it continues to be an exercise in expanding small elements of cameras beyond what the un-aided eye can see.  By isolating these details the paintings express different ideas that would not otherwise be exposed.

The 35mm focal length was  very popular on fixed lens compact cameras so you might be forgiven for thinking they all perform the same.  If I’m to be totally honest that’s what I was thinking when I tried this camera.  So the 35mm f3.5 Elmar did do a great job with sharp clear images, but what really set this camera apart for me  was the accuracy of the center weighted metering,  it got all 36 frames right.  There are few controls, primarily flash auto,on,off and infinity focus as well as a self timer and that’s it.  Simple yet effective.  Now for the downside.  It’s not that durably built, it has a fair amount of barrel distortion and some vignetting when it uses large apertures.

Most of the images I took on this roll were reference shots for future paintings so I don’t actually have that many images to include. 

By the way this is my 200th post, just saying, I don’t need a cake or anything but it’s 200 posts after all.