One of the drawbacks of the SRT101 and its pro-range brothers was that its shutter and speed indicators in the viewfinder were extremely hard to see in low light.
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ISO up to 6400 is nothing to be sniffed at (that’s as far as my 1990s-era F100 goes aswell) which makes it great for shooting in poor light if you wanted to push black and white film up to 3200 or 6400, this camera would be perfect. The SRT 100X has some features that much more expensive film SLRs lack. The 100X might be a budget model, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s hardly compact – it towers over contemporaries like the Nikon FE or the Olympus OM-2. The SRT 100X is a chunky camera – it’s almost all metal, with very few plastic parts. Though I’d shot a few rolls with a faulty SRT 101 I’d found in a charity shop, this was really the first time I’d got to grips with an old Minolta. Everything worked just as it should even the seals were still light-tight. I bought my SRT 100X a few years back at London’s Photographica fair. Jump on eBay and you’ll see what I mean – working models, sometimes with the superlative 58/1.4 lens, can be had for as little as £25. A secondhand ‘pro’ model like the SRT 101 or 202 is unlikely to cost you much more these days – SRTs don’t have anything like the recognition of Nikon Fs, Olympus’s OM cameras or even the Pentax Spotmatic. The SRT 100X, like the earlier SRT 100, tends to get overlooked these days. SRT 101s became rightly respected photographer W Eugene Smith took one of the most powerful pictures of the 20 th Century, Tomoko Umeara in Her Bath, on one, while covering the effects of industrial mercury poisoning on Japanese fishing villages. If the battery went dead, the only thing you lost was metering – like most SLRs of the time the shutter was mechanically timed. All of them came with some standard features an incredibly bright finder, a battery test button which showed if your battery was still reliable enough for metering, and a cloth shutter with speeds up to 1/1000s. The SRT range was continuously refined throughout the 1970s. That’s something we take for granted today, but was a genuine step forward for photographers back then. It could meter from ISO 6 to 6400 (no mean feat for a 1960s camera) and a viewfinder metering system that took into account shutter speed, aperture and ISO. The SRT101 had a secret weapon Minolta’s ‘Contrast Light Compensator’, which monitored the brightest and darkest parts of the scene, evening out the contrast between shadows and highlights. The SRT range began with the SRT101, released in 1966 and in production for the following nine years. The Minolta SRT 100X is one of them.įrom 1966 to 1981, Minolta released 26 cameras built to use its Minolta MC lenses – lenses that communicated with the camera so that the photographer could compose and meter with the lens wide open.
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Many photographers, however, will remember Minolta for the SRT range of SLRs they were manual focus cameras from the same age as the Pentax Spotmatic and Olympus OMs. It’s Dynax-series SLRS of the 1990s included the Dynax 9, a tough-as-old-boots pro-level camera every bit as good as cameras being made by Canon and Nikon. It’s long relationship with Germany’s Leica created cameras like the Minolta CLE, a compact auto-exposure rangefinder considered one of the best film cameras ever made. It was the first camera maker to introduce integrated autofocus on an SLR (theMinolta Maxxum 7000), rather than the far more clunky version built onto a lens. Minolta might not have been as iconic a camera company as Japan’s Big Four – Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Pentax – but it made many fantastic cameras in the 75 years before it merged with imaging giant Konica. But don’t be fooled, this camera is no slouch.
This time for a camera that often lives in the shadow of its contemporaries. Stephen Dowling is back again with another great camera review.
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