FAQ

 
What’s go­ing on here?

»My Min­olta Mu­seum« has been es­tab­lished to present a per­son­al col­lec­tion of Min­olta SLR gear. I bought my very first cam­era, a Min­olta XG‑9, back in 1980, and I sticked to that brand ever since un­til I switched over to di­git­al im­age tak­ing more than 25 years later. This site is in­ten­ded to be a visu­al show­case of my treas­ured cam­er­as and lenses which still im­press me due to their ver­sat­il­ity and the fine work­man­ship in­volved.

 
Did/do you ac­tu­ally use all these cam­er­as and stuff?

Well, no. I sold my XG‑9 when the Dyn­ax (aka Maxxum) fam­ily of auto­fo­cus cam­er­as entered the mar­ket and I ob­tained a Dyn­ax 7000i in 1989 which was my com­pan­ion for many years. Later, I up­graded to the 600si clas­sic which was my ideal of a mod­ern cam­era with tra­di­tion­al con­trols. These two cam­er­as were the only ones that I used my­self for more than a hand­ful of film rolls. I bought all the oth­ers on oc­ca­sion for my little col­lec­tion be­cause I liked their design and their im­port­ant role in the Min­olta product his­tory. Yes, I am a col­lect­or and I’m happy to be the private cur­at­or of sev­er­al tiny per­son­al mu­seums. This is a con­ta­gious dis­ease, how­ever, so don’t read on if you don’t like to be temp­ted to buy ob­sol­ete stuff... ;-)

 
Do you sell any of the vin­tage equip­ment shown here?

I do, but only in bundled lots, i.e. com­plete cam­era sets con­sist­ing of body, the match­ing lenses and ac­cess­ory parts as lis­ted on the in­di­vidu­al cam­era pages. Of­fers for single items won’t be ac­cep­ted or even answered. If you are in­ter­ested in ob­tain­ing one of my cam­er­as, please send me a mail.

 
Upon scru­pu­lous ex­am­in­a­tion of your pic­tures, I found out that some lens caps or oth­er smal­ler ac­cess­ory parts are ac­tu­ally miss­ing?

No, you only found out that I was not care­ful enough some­times when ar­ran­ging the items on the table for tak­ing pho­tos of them. Later on, I real­ized all (?) of my mis­takes my­self, but I was ad­mit­tedly too lazy to get through all the pre­par­a­tion work again in or­der to make new pic­tures...

 
In what con­di­tion are the items?

All of my pho­to­graph­ic gear shows very little (if any) signs of use and I’m test­ing all mech­an­ic­al func­tions (film trans­port, shut­ter, aper­ture ring etc.) at least once a year to pre­vent stor­age dam­age due to lack of use. There are no scratches on glass sur­faces and there is no oil on the aper­ture blades and no fungus on the glass lenses. Fur­ther­more, I do not smoke and there aren’t any cats or dogs in my house­hold... ;-)

 
I guess that pack­ing & post­age go ex­tra?

Yes.

 
I might be in­ter­ested in ob­tain­ing parts of your col­lec­tion, but I still have sev­er­al ques­tions that I don’t find answered here?

Great! Just drop me a note at ralph@my-minolta-museum.info; I will reply as soon as pos­sible and to the best of my know­ledge.

 
With what brand and type of cam­era are you tak­ing pho­togaphs nowadays?

I really got tired of car­ry­ing around bulky hard­ware. So since 2006, I use Can­on com­pact cam­er­as (shame on me), mainly for il­lus­trat­ing the posts pub­lished in my per­son­al blog. How­ever, I also bought a pre­vi­ously owned SONY SLT-A58 in 2017 for which I keep (and don’t sell) my five fixed fo­cal length Min­olta AF lenses.

 
May I ask you some ques­tions about oth­er vin­tage Min­olta gear (tech­nic­al de­tails, pro­duc­tion date, prices etc.)?

Of course you may, but chances are that you won’t get an an­swer at all: I am neither a spe­cial­ist nor a pro­fes­sion­al, I don’t do any re­searches and I won’t es­tim­ate the worth of the vin­tage cam­era col­lec­tion some­body in­her­ited from his fath­er. Sorry to be ex­pli­cit, but there are quite a few ded­ic­ated for­ums out there where you may post re­quests like these!

 
Last up­dated: 2025-06-25 at 7:26 AM