1963 Minolta SRT 101

[mbranciforte]

Hi everyone,

 

I have a question...I have an old 1963 Minolta SRT 101 and a Nikon

N90s. I really cannot decide which to use when. I really love the

old Minolta, but I really don't know how good the optics on it are

compared to the Nikon. For the Minolta, I am using a Rokkor 50mm

1.7

 

Does anyone have any thoughts about the Minolta vs. the Nikon. The

Nikon is a lot easier to use obviously, but I would be willing to

use the Minolta a lot more if I knew there was some advantage to

doing so. Now, its being used more as an antique and less as a

camera. What do you think...?

 

Thanks so much for all of your help.

 

All the best and cheers!

 

-Michael

[patrick j dempsey]

Michael, those old Minoltas are great cameras. Ive got an SR-3 (1960) with the 55mm 1:1.8 Auto Rokkor lens, as well as the 28mm 1:2.8 MC Celtic. The Rokkor lenses are excellently sharp and impressive lenses. What a beautiful huge chunk of glass! That camera you have is a shooter. Its also quite a peice of history. Minolta SLRs from the 60s were very expensive gear new, and for a good reason, they were well designed and well manufactured. The TTL metering in your SRT was a ground breaking design in 1966, one of many design acheivements for Minolta.

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As far as advantages over the Nikon, heres one I can think of... every Minolta SLR lens made from 1958 until now will fit your camera without adaptation. Of course you wont be able to use the autofocus and other new-fangled features. So if you see a Minolta SLR lens for sale for cheap you shouldnt have to worry about it not fitting your camera. But considering the longevity of the Nikon mount perhaps this is not as much an advantage over the Nikon but good company. These are both cameras you can build on.

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The second and by far the biggest advantage I can see you getting from shooting with the SRT is going to at first seem like a pile of disadvantages. Here you've got this camera thats 40 years old, from the very dawn of TTL metering. Its big and heavy. The upper end of its speed settings is one eighth of what your new Nikon will do. The mirror is loud and sounds like a mouse trap going off. It takes awhile to compose and focus a shot and set the aperature and then that 180` film advance takes awhile to wind. Basically this is a camera that slows you down. It forces you to think more about your shot, the depth of feild and the lighting.

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Having said that I'll have to admit to being a hypocrite, I dont shoot my SR-3 much anymore. Primarily because it doesnt have a built-in meter (the removeable SR Selenium meter is dead) and the hand-held meters I have are older than the camera and barely function in low light. And secondly because I now own an OM-1 which is dramatically lighter and features TTL metering. <br><br>

Here's a shot taken with my SR-3 with the 28mm Celtic lens. This was a very dark and overcast day and I was using a deep-yellow filter and slow film, and metered using one of the afore-mentioned ancient hand-held meters. As you can see, this old bulky and heavy camera performed excellent hand-held in low light, (while I was walking along a rocky path with the camera glued to my face):

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<img src="http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b15/patrickjdempsey/Recent%20Travels%20Black%20and%20White/img043.jpg">

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This is an excellent site with information on all things Minolta:

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<a href="http://members.aol.com/manualminolta/minslr.htm">Minolta SLRs</a><br>

<a href="http://members.aol.com/xkaes/slrlens.htm">Minolta SLR Lenses</a>

[clinton_abe]

Michael- If you have a 1963 SRT-101, you better hold on to it, as it is the only one made in '63. Looking at the link given on the above reply, the SRT-101 first came out in 1966. I remember first seeing an ad for it here in the US, in 1967. Do you have a picture of it you can post, as I would like to see the first SRT-101 made.

[bill_thorlin]

I still have my 101 bought in 1969 and it still functions as it should after enormous amount of use.

 

Advantages - built like a brick outhouse, rugged & reliable, not a lot that can go wrong (mechanics), a lens selection of enormous scope and quality at very cheap prices (check on fleabay), people still offering servicing facilities, lot of internet sites offering support and guidance and ( finally ) top results.

 

Disadvantages - old and slow but that happens to all of us !

 

The old advert applies - "hours of harmless fun" - ever since 1966 when it was released.

[rover]

You are comparing apples and oranges. Your Nikon is a wonderful modern camera and you Minolta is too. Personally, I really like Minolta lenses. They made a ton of standard lenses, their 50/1.7 or any ilk is very very good.

 

Which is better, this is a lot different question than asking blond or brunette.

[patrick j dempsey]

After my long winded response I forgot the most important part of what I was going to say... If you want to know which camera is better in different circumstances your gonna have to shoot them both. At first you may find the Minolta slow and cumbersome, so probably not good for sports and action photography. I think eventually you will learn to appreciate simplified and well-designed controls and find yourself shooting pretty fast with the SRT. Me personally, I cant stand a complicated electronic camera at all, I actually kind of enjoy discovering the limitations of older cameras and learning to work with them and around them. Maybe the SRT would be better on days you plan on just wandering around the woods or an old farm, where surprises tend to come in the form of strange rock formations or light coming through the trees and you have time to work with the limitations of the camera, as opposed to days in the city or at a carnival when you might appreciate the autofocus and other fancy helpers on the Nikon.

[mat chat]

Hey, so here goes - my tuppence worth.

 

As has been said before they are two drastically different cameras and will perform well in different areas, for example the SRT may be better for street photography as people will find it less threatening than the Nikon. Secondly i'd say that the glass for your Minolta is as good as most today (better than the zooms) and its worth bearing in mind that other than Leica Minolta is/ was the only other manufacturer to make their own glass.

[randrew1]

As it happens, I also have a SRT 101 and an N90s. I bought the SRT used in 1972. I bought the N90S a couple years ago (also used). I still use both cameras. My choice of camera depends mostly on which lens I want to use. My Minolta mount 28-210 zoom is not a great lens, but it is far more convenient than carrying multiple lenses. I don't have anything as fast as the 58mm f/1.4 Rokkor to use on my Nikon. I like the auto exposure, the auto focus, and the hot shoe on the Nikon, but I have to make sure I have extra batteries. The only thing that requires a battery on the Minolta is the meter. I can get by without that. I also have to take my reading glasses along to use the Nikon so I can read the LCD display. The Minolta is simple enough that I don't need to read anything.

 

Bottom line is that I like the features on the Nikon, but sometimes prefer the simplicity of the Minolta.

[e_b7]

The Rokkor 50mm 1.7 is one of my favorite lenses, and I've used just about everything. I suggest to use the Nikon when you want autofocus and use the Minolta when you don't want to concern yourself with batteries.

[mbranciforte]

Thank you everyone for all of your helpful input. I really love the Minolta and the Rokkor lens a lot. It's just that a lot of the traveling I've been doing recently has been calling for a quicker AF and AE camera. When I have time to stop and compose my shots better, I will start using the Minolta a lot more...no question.

 

I'm glad to hear that there are people out there that still use this camera and hold on to traditional photography in an age of digital. Film rules!

 

Thanks everyone!

 

Best regards,

Michael

[david_m]

I have to laugh at everyone saying the SRT-101 is 'old and slow'. For decades almost every working professional used a Nikon F or F2. They have exactly the same manual features as the SRT-101. Many photographers supported their families working with just those two cameras. To answer the question, Minolta Rokkor lenses are just as good as Nikkor lenses but you will have to test your own examples.

[patrick j dempsey]

Well I just meant compared to a digital point and shoot that focuses and adjusts the aperature before you can even press the button all the way down. ;) And yes to many people in their 20s or younger, that is very old and slow! Trust me, as a member of the instant gratification generation I get some strange looks for shooting with equiptment twice my age! Patience and thoughtfulness I think are very important qualities for an artist (or a person) and I think anyone entering into the world of film photography today must possess those qualities. Its not like it was 40 or 50 years ago... when there was no such thing as a camera that would focus on whatever you looked at in the veiwfinder and then automatically set the aperature and exposure to your preference... and then be able to publish the image in about 5 minutes all over the world... thats fast. But to those photographers in the 60s a Nikon F series SLR was a great technological revolution over the press cameras or TLRs of the 30s - 50s, it was much faster, more flexible, and easier to carry. If you asked a journalist from the 1960s if they would carry around their 35mm SLR or a glass plate camera and portable studio to process the chemistry on-site, they would laugh in your face... but to newspapers at the turn of the century this was considered a great technological revolution over a hand-drawn etching or woodblock print, which had been the standard for 500 years! (And before that the only way to record an image was to spend months or years doing a painting which could only be reproduced by spending more months copying it and never acheiving an identical image to the original) Whenever I shoot film, the spoiled part of my brain thinks, "man it would be nice to see these images in 5 minutes"... and whenever I get negatives that are out of focus or a little too dark part of me thinks "try to pay attention next time", while another (lazier) part of me thinks... "I dont really have to do it this way, why do I bother?" So yeah I think for a young person to choose to shoot with a manual camera from the 60s as opposed to his new auto-everything Nikon is a very interesting and different choice than the guy in the 60s who chose the top-of-the-line Nikon.

 

But then again I'm one of those guys who chooses to spend months working on a one-off painting that can best be reproduced by some alternative medium like photography that still drastically degrades the qualities of the orginal...

[kenneth_cooke]

<p>Whilst visiting the National Museum of Photography in Bradford today my wife kindly gave me a lift and dropped me at the top end of the city. As I was in no rush I wandered around the old woolen mills area making one or two pictures before they turn it into des. res. apartments. I wandered into Bradford Camera Exchange briefly and talked Leica and then guess what. I spotted a very good condition Minolta SRT 101 with a 50mm 1.4 Rokkor for under £50.00 and decided to go for. Although I love my Leica M6 system close ups are difficult due to parallax. It seems a terrific camera. The closest I have ever been to Minolta was a Leica R3MOT which I had years ago as I always favoured Nikon F SLRs but the build of this camera seems very sound the only thing that appears not to function is the mirror lock up and the front section of the pentaprism housing is loose but is despatched by the mirror action when the shutter is pressed. I tested the camera meter next to a Gossen Starlite 2 Spotmeter and the readings were very camparable. The camera comes with a 3 month garantee so I am hoping the minor problems can be rectified and I am looking forward to processing the results </p>