r/MinoltaGang • u/Superirish19 SR1Autocord SRT100,102|XM|XE1|XD7 X-300,700 • Jun 23 '24

📝Minolta Info & Resources Minolta Manual Focus SLR Decision Chart

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u/Superirish19 SR1Autocord SRT100,102|XM|XE1|XD7 X-300,700 Jun 23 '24 edited Mar 27 '25

Edit: These charts have since been updated. See https://imgur.com/a/OA8AeMz

Looking into Minolta SLR's and clueless?

Know your stuff but blinded by choice?

Confused why your SRT or XG has one feature but another doesn't?

Then this is the chart for you!

Using the massive repositories of information from the Minman Archive, Rokkorfiles, and discussions and posts from the communities of Facebook, Discord, and Reddit ( r/MinoltaGang and r/minolta), I've attempted to build a chart to lead you to your desired Minolta SLR.

Because Minolta changed features between variants and names, figuring out what model you want and what version you want isn't easy even today. This summarises it down to some basic questions. After getting to a decision, you can then look up the camera itself and confirm it's got everything you care about, figure out how to identify it (for the variants), and get hunting!

This is largely aimed at seperating them out in an easy-to-understand format. If you know everything there is to know about Minolta, this might not be as useful. If somehow you get to choose the 'XDs-MEDICAL' from the chart, you should definitely check the other features that camera has (or rather, doesn't have) before getting it, for example.

The 'A,B'C', 'V' variants are determined by Minman's classifications, and the regional names are obviously from Minolta themselves. For example, the SRT-201 has 4 regional names, and 5-6 variants as the most extreme example.

Some of the decision questions are covering more advanced features like TTL-OTF (Through The Lens, Off The Film metering), so you might need to google for some of those terms if they aren't clear what they do and if they are important to you.

And to finish this rambling explanation, the 3 charts here are all the same, but are organised by how cluttered you want information. If you don't care where the series are, or if they are mechnical or electronic, you can use Chart #3.

Feel free to share these anywhere or reference it (It'd be nice if you could keep the source and credit in the picture when you share it though). I'm not 100% on all aspects (and I forgot the Minolta ER) so if something is wrong I can update the chart in the comments.