Minolta 140 Riva Zoom (capios 140A)

I leave Japan in 2 days. I have a few posts in my draft folder, but for a while I will not be testing new to me cameras. I have a few samples waiting for me in England, but I think I will be tired for a while when I get back.

This is a camera I tested about a two months ago. I haven’t got around to posting it as there were other cameras I was excited about posting first. This is just another one of those cameras with many names depending on where you buy it. A garden variety point and shoot. I think it is from the 1990s but it is difficult to pin down technical details due to the number of variation released.

This website was the best one I found for technical details. If you check it out you will find this camera was the first to have subject detection, which is now a given with digital cameras. There is a button on the top to change the area size used for the auto-focus. This website lets you know the aperture range is from f5.4-f11.7, check out those weird decimal points. The zoom also starts at 37.5mm.

The focusing seemed average in terms of speed, sometimes the orange light would flash meaning focusing was not achieved….for quite some time. It needed lots of contrast to work effectively. When it did lock onto something you could see an orange dashed box in the viewfinder around what it had chosen to focus on. If I did not rush the process the focusing was superb. It was not really suitable for fast-moving subjects or items with flat density.

The most amazing thing about this camera was or was not the sound…it was practically silent. You barely knew it was working.

I decided to use some Oriental Seagull for the test roll.

As you can see the exposure choices were great but sometimes the focusing or speed choices were poor. I also think I used the beginning of the film before as there was some overlapping, but it might be the way I loaded it…I don’t think so though.

Keep or sell: I have many point and shoots. I do like the subject detection, but sometimes it takes a bit too long. I prefer the Olympus Mjus I have, so I gave it away.