minolta lens to sony a3000

[daniel_mueller1]

<p>I am just getting started into digital photography. What do I lose if I use and adaptor to fit a couple of old Minolta lenses > MD 50 f1.7 and a MD 50-135 f3.5, to my sony a3000?</p>

[dennis_mcmenemy]

<p>Daniel Muller: I am no expert and some others can give you better answers. Of coarse you lose auto focus. Some say you might lose a little image quality. I will tell the old Minolta Rokkors are good lenses. It is a popular thing to adapt these old Rokkors and other SR mount lenses to Sony Cameras. I have seen Rokkors for sale on EBay already adapted for the Alpha and the E mount Sony's. As you know Minolta joined Konica and in 2006 they stopped camera production. KonicaMinolta is still in business doing other things. I am glad Sony bought the camera rights and has carried on the tradition. My favorite is the Sony A7 but I can't afford it.</p>

[daniel_mueller1]

Hey Dennis thank you for the info I really appreciate it.

[howardstanbury]

<p>In a sense you don't loose anything IQ-wise because there is no optical component in Minolta MD adapters for the E mount. Adapters can be found for $20 or less online. Remember that the A3000 has a crop sensor so the effective focal length of those lenses is multiplied by 1.5, i.e. they are equivalent to 75mm and 75-200mm lenses on 35mm cameras.</p>

<p>Those manual focus lenses will still need to be manually focused on your camera, but Sony provide focus peaking and image magnification to help this. You can set the camera to work in Aperture Priority mode and it will work out the exposure according to the aperture you set on the lens.</p>

[daniel_mueller1]

<p>Thank you Howard. I am glad to be able to use my old lenses. Dan</p>

[scott_holt2]

<p>I use a number of older Minolta lenses on both by NEX 5N and a6000. I use a Novoflex adapter and it is pretty solid. I have read good things about Metabones... and mixed opinions on others. <br /><br />With the adapter you do not have exposure coupling, so everything is manual exposure. I am not familiar with the a3000, but on the 5N and a6000, working in manual exposure mode is not difficult at all. Your next choice is whether to use focus peaking or MF assist. I find MF assist is a bit better for find focusing. If you stop down or are not as concerned about critical focus, then peaking is good.<br>

One thing I do that makes peaking a little easier is to shoot in B&W style. This, of course, makes your resulting JPEGs black and white, but if you shoot raw+j and process the raw off camera may not be a huge issue. When you choose the B&W style, the EVF displays the image in monochrome. This makes the color lines of the peaking function that much more obvious.<br>

<br />One downside I have noticed about the older MD lenses is that they don't render contrast as well as newer lenses. It's not too bad, and easily correctable in post... and it's not consistent across all lenses. There are also reports of some issues with magenta casts and aberrations, but that's mostly when using wide angle range finder lenses. Some lenses which are classics on film are absolute dogs on digital. I have not noticed this with any of my MDs, but the widest I have is a 35mm.</p>