Minolta Hi-Matic 7s II

The Minolta Hi-Matic 7s II is a cool little camera with the main feature being the excellent 40mm F1.7 Rokkor. This lens is very sharp, the color rendering is fantastic and deserves to be in the hall of fame of compact camera's lenses.

Minolta Hi Matic 7S II

So, besides the lens, what's good in this camera? First, it has a shutter speed priority mode and a mechanical shutter from 1/8s to 1/500s. A mechanical shutter is important because the camera can work without batteries, you just need an external light meter, an exposure table or just use the sunny 16 rule.

The aperture is set automatically by the built-in light meter when you set it to auto mode, from F1.7 to F16 what gives the camera a reasonably wide exposure range.

If you want it's possible to set the aperture manually, but the light meter will be turned off when you do this. This means that if you want to shoot manually you will not have a working light meter. Just to be clear.

The camera is well built, small, sturdy and not heavy.

But there are some design flaws. First the horrible viewfinder. It's small and dim with a bluish tint. There's an aperture scale on the right side visible on it and the calculated aperture is shown there when using the auto mode. You need to carefully center your eye to properly see the frame mask and the aperture scale. 

Second, the rangefinder. Not very precise for close range and the patch contrast is poor and hard to see in dim light. This can be a problem with a large aperture lens like this one.

It takes 49mm standard filters, what's good, instead of strange diameters like 43.5mm used in the Olympus 35RC

ISO selectable from 25 to 800.

A great camera and not expensive, but it can't compete with the wonderful Olympus 35 RD that has a much better viewfinder, a similar lens and goes down to 1/2s shutter speed.