A few years ago, a friend gifted me a Minolta XG-M. He didn’t do much with 35mm and when he does, he’s a Nikon guy, so this little camera was sitting idle. I used it once or twice back then, fixed a problem it had (I forgot what it was, really) and then it went back into storage. Until I brushed off the dust a few weeks ago and gave it another spin. What a nice little camera!
Silly little things, they are – the small details I sometimes like (or dislike) in equipment. With the Minolta XG-M, it’s the shutter release. And also the soft-touch metering thing. Touch the shutter release button with your finger and the meter comes on. It just feels so nice!
The camera came with a Minolta MD 50/2 lens. That’s fine to get a feeling for, but it’s not a focal length I use much. Since I ended up liking the camera, I put out a feeler for a wide angle lens. Sure enough, a kind fellow offered a trio of lenses – a 28/3.5, 135/2.8 and a 35-70/3.5 zoom. Great!
Yesterday, between laundry & ironing and groceries & cooking, I took the camera for a brief spin. Practicing scales, my friend Gary calls it. Look for lines, relations between shapes, fields, tones. There’s a few spots nearby that offer a ‘target rich environment’ (Gary’s words again). Some bulk-loaded Fomapan 200 will do fine. I developed it in Pyrocat HD 1+1+100 (a convenience choice), for 12 minutes with an agitation cycle every 3 minutes. The negatives look fine.
Below are some scans from the negatives, with curve adjustment in Gimp. I didn’t go wild with layers – just a single curve adjustment.
Great little camera! I’m particularly surprised at the 35-70 zoom. Zoom lenses from this era are often…errr…not so great – especially in the wide-normal range. This one seems to be pretty good. Very little barrel distortion at 35mm, a small amount of pincushion at 70mm. Sharpness seems A-OK as far as I can tell so far.
The 28/2.8 performs quite well, too, for a wide angle lens of this age. Some barrel distortion, but less so than some other (esp. 3rd party) brands from this era, and it’s a little prone to flare. Otherwise, it seems to be doing just fine.
The 135 I’ve not used much, yet, but so far, no surprises. The 135’s are virtually always optically really good (very sharp), although they virtually all suffer quite a bit from flare. This one seems no different, although the built-in metal hood makes a real difference.
The only thing I need to fix are the degraded light seals along the back of the camera. I lost two frames to what appears to be in-camera flare along the top edge, so I assume that’s the seals. Sure enough, the seals are pretty much gone. Not so much degraded – actually gone for the most part. Fortunately, I’ve still got some bits of foam from Aki-Asahi that I can cut to size as needed.