Minolta Lives

After speaking with my friend Anthony, a Minolta devotee, and learning of the genius of the NEX-7, I’m finally beginning to equate Sony with Minolta.  He has some legacy Minolta A-Mount lenses from the Maxxum era that he wants to use, and we’ve gone full circle, exploring some of the new offerings.

He needs both a full-feature camera, and a walk-round camera, And I’m beginning to think an Alpha a580 and NEX-7 would be perfect for him. Both would accept his older lenses, and there are so many new offerings that it’s mind-blowing.

Sony is producing some incredibly competent cameras, with some of the highest resolutions around. The new Alpha a900 full-frame DSLR is a prime example. True, it tops out at ISO 6400, but it’s probably so clean you could shoot in RAW and easily open the images up two stops if you needed to. The a580 on the other hand is just the perfect combination of performance and price, just as the Nikon D7000 is.

I myself learned photography on an SR-T 201, and often wonder why I chose the Canon AE-1 over the XG 7 for my first camera. In retrospect, the XG 7, with its aperture-priority mode would have been a much better choice at the time.