Essential older Minolta lenses for a Sony setup

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Max
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Hello,

I am asking for a bit of help from any Sony / Minolta TP regular's

I have the Minolta 50mm 1.7 and love it, super sharp and lovely

But am wondering what else I should keep an eye out for which is sharp and built nicely to have lasted the time.

Thank you

Max
 
the 70-210mm f4 beercan has to be pretty high on the list. it's built like a tank and gives really good pictures with typical minolta colours. any of the beercan era lens will generally give you value for money.

check out dyxum lens database to check up on any lenses that you have your eye on

http://www.dyxum.com/lenses/index.asp
 
they work just fine, they were originally intended for use with af film slr's. when sony bought minolta's camera business they just continued using the a-mount system to utilise all the old minolta lenses already in circulation. probably in the hope that the owners would buy sony dslr's
 
There are a few of note. The 70-210 constant f/4 beer can has been mentioned. This was a design shared with Leica I understand, and superb. If I still had a Minolta/Sony system I'd own this lens again.

The 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 is another. Sharing the same type of construction as the beercan, it's an obvious partner and a very high quality standard zoom.

Lastly, in this trinity of lenses, Minolta made a 17-35mm which I never personally owned, that was very highly regarded and the results I saw seemed to bear that out. The body construction was the same as the above two but it seems to be a lot rarer. I can't remember the aperture range.

All three of these lenses were launched with the original 7000, not the later Dynax series. While they don't focus as fast as the later lenses due to their AF gearing being lower, the build quality vastly exceeded any of the later lenses, and they used a lot of metal in their outer construction. Quality was excellent.

Simon
 
Simes123 said:
There are a few of note. The 70-210 constant f/4 beer can has been mentioned. This was a design shared with Leica I understand, and superb. If I still had a Minolta/Sony system I'd own this lens again.

The 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 is another. Sharing the same type of construction as the beercan, it's an obvious partner and a very high quality standard zoom.

Lastly, in this trinity of lenses, Minolta made a 17-35mm which I never personally owned, that was very highly regarded and the results I saw seemed to bear that out. The body construction was the same as the above two but it seems to be a lot rarer. I can't remember the aperture range.

All three of these lenses were launched with the original 7000, not the later Dynax series. While they don't focus as fast as the later lenses due to their AF gearing being lower, the build quality vastly exceeded any of the later lenses, and they used a lot of metal in their outer construction. Quality was excellent.

Simon
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Thats great Simon, I will look those up, really appreciate you posting.

Max
 
Simes123 said:
Lastly, in this trinity of lenses, Minolta made a 17-35mm which I never personally owned, that was very highly regarded and the results I saw seemed to bear that out. The body construction was the same as the above two but it seems to be a lot rarer. I can't remember the aperture range.
Click to expand...

Minolta made two 17-35 lenses. The first was the 17-35/3.5 G, which was made in the late 1990s. Later was the Konica Minolta 17-35/2.8-4 D, which had 8 electrical contacts rather than the 5 of earlier Minolta lenses, hence the "D" designation (the additional contacts support ADI flash functionality). Neither lens was available at the time Minolta launched the 7000.

The G lens has the robust construction associated with all lenses bearing that label, and is expensive and rare. The D is much cheaper.

In all honesty, unless you have a full frame camera an APS-C wide angle lens (e.g. Sigma 10-20) would probably be better.
 
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