This is the Minolta XD (as it’s known in Japan), also called the XD11 in North America and the XD7 in Europe.

This was given to me a while ago by a friend but I forgot about it and didn’t try it. Then I got to try a Leica R4 for a while. I didn’t really like it that much, but I discovered that the Leica was a result of a collaboration between Leica and Minolta and the the R4 and the XD had a lot in common. This encouraged me to dig out the XD and give it a try.

There’s lots of information on the web relating to this camera – these articles to name but a few:

• Camera Geekery: Minolta XD11 Review
• The Rokkor Files. The Minolta XD series.
• Minolta XD 35mm Film Camera Review
• Minolta XD — Review Part 1 (A three part review starting here)
• The Minolta XD-7 (XD-11) – Multimode SLR

I liked it much more than I liked the R4. It’s a solid, feature packed camera that did everything that I would want to do. The only problem I encountered was in framing. On a couple of occasions it was off. In future I must remember to not frame too tightly

In it’s day it was Minolta’s top of the line camera and I’m not at all surprised to read that it is considered by many to be Minolta’s all time best manual camera.