Junk and Cheap Camera Month: Will it or won’t it work for me?

I got this from a junk seller on eBay who clumps together 3 or 4 cameras and sells them for parts. There are no guarantees, no returns, it is always a gamble…but what if they work? Then you have an absolute bargain. In this lot, I got 3 SLRs for about £13. One worked and I have already written about that. None of the three came with a lens, but I have a few to choose from.

This camera has a Minolta MD mount and you can see I put on an Orion 28mm. It is a copy of the Minolta X-300, probably the reason for the lens mount. If you look at photos of a X-300 from the top, you can see they are identical. Minolta sold the moldings to another company and as a result, a few versions of this camera exist. You can read more about that here. For some reason, I much prefer my X-300 to this one. I like how it looks over this version, and I like how it feels. This one seems to be bulkier and less tactile, but that might be my imagination. You can find the Centon version cheaper than the Minolta, which might be useful to know.

Anyway, what about my junk version? Well, my example’s light meter seemed to be faulty. The indicator always showed there wasn’t enough light. It could also work in manual mode so I used that to test the camera.

Firstly, I loaded a short roll of Exeter 400 and tried a few Cokin filters for good measure. Here are some of the results.

A couple of the filters I used are obvious, but can you match the photos to the filters?
* Parallel Multi-image filter
* Red filter
* Split focus filter
* Close-up filter
* No Filter

Later, I tried a short roll of Street Candy 400 while wandering the Lancaster area.

This time the results were badly under-exposed and the camera struggled, it sounded different. I think I got the last bit of ‘juice’ out of this example. I am sure it wasn’t the settings I used or my developing, it is possible though. I didn’t particularly like using the Centon before this point and this might have made me a bit lax in my attention to details.

Did it work for me? For a while, then no. I had another junk camera that was missing a battery cover. I checked this one and it fit the other perfectly, hence it is missing in the photos. This one has become a donor for that one which seems to have a working light meter. We shall see in the next few days.