I have tried this camera before, but it didn’t rock my world. To be fair I didn’t really give it a good go and sold it before I had a chance to put a second film through it. Then I received an influx of Minolta bodies and lenses from a friend and this camera was in that pile.

Unfortunately, when I tried to put batteries in this new example the battery terminals were completely rusted. There was no connection at all.

So with nothing to lose, I decided to try and remove the rust in an abrasive way. I figured I had the 7000i, this one was free and didn’t really care for it. So, first I dunked the battery compartment in water then put bicarbonate soda on the rusty parts. Then I dipped the whole thing in white vinegar and watched it bubble. When the bubbling had stopped I dried it off and repeated the process. Then I used a scouring pad to scrape off the rust.

Now, as you can see, I was a bit too vigorous with the scrubbing part and pulled off one of the springs. With a handy dentist tool I managed to get it back in the pinchers. To be fair the rust did come off, look at that sparkling spring. But did it work after? Well, there wouldn’t be a photo post if it hadn’t. Oh and interestingly, this example took AAA batteries whereas my first one took a 2CR5. This thread says there are a few different battery holders available. My new example also had a databack. Other than those two things they are the same camera hence no photos.

I loaded a roll of Rollei RPX 400 and wandered around a few places, then developed the film.

And this is the point where I went, something is wrong with my processing. Now three films have been damaged. The first time it happened I thought it was the film as it was expired. The second I thought, “that’s odd?? what happened here??” So I developed this film with a lot of care, but no, still weird. So after this film, I stopped and discussed the matter with Zone Imaging and queried whether I had a bad batch of chemicals. Then I figured that is dumb, they know what they are doing, it must be me, something is off. So I reread the instructions pamphlet I received and compared the times to the app I was using and sure enough, there was a difference. The app was now giving the wrong times for pyro and could not be trusted. I have to manually adjust the timer before starting any development with pyro and I will do that each time I use it. The app works fine with all other developers that I have tried just not pyro at the moment.

I decided to try a part roll of Fomadon 200 before giving up on pyro completely. I took a few shots of a friend while in Starbucks before getting down to the processing. I double-checked, then triple-checked the times before starting.

Here are the results from that short roll. I figured if the processing still had issues I had only wasted a very short part of a film.

Yatta!!! Perfect, phew, all is right in the world again and blacks are black again.

Also, I can see this camera worked really well and I am glad I gave it another try. I am also loving the new Minolta lenses I received in the junk box, lucky me. And now normal service should resume and hopefully no more underprocessed rolls of film for a while. I am not going to say…no more weird rolls of film, because that’s the film life.

Update: A little while after I figured out the processing issue and it was all down to exhausted fix. So I went back to this set of negs and refixed them, scanning them again after. There was a huge difference so I decided to update this post.

So here is the first set of photos, refixed and rescanned.

Yeah!!!! I got my photos back. I love them even more now they have been rescued. And I love this camera, but I don’t really need the 7000 and the 7000i so this might be sold even though I love it….keeping the prime lenses though.