Every once in awhile, you get to collect something with no say in the matter. I have a couple of thrifting buddies I get to see every week. They have brought me several items in the past year. They brought me a Kodak bulb flash unit in the original box, a Canon “Lens mug” and this week a small foam camera and two instruction books for the Yashica Auto Focus S and the Kodak Ektralite 10. All these items were free and appreciated.
This week they also offered me a Minolta X-370 in the original box, complete with 50 mm FD Minolta f/2 lens. This camera they said they would like $10 for. I was thrilled to give them the money because I really owed them for thinking of me when they found stuff I would like.
It wasn’t all smiles and giggles though. For starters the camera didn’t work. The mirror was up, the advance lever was stuck, the shutter wouldn’t fire… Secondly the lens cap broke as we tried to place it on the lens. Thirdly the half case that came with the camera is the front half, not the half that wraps around the camera body.
Still, as I have said I owed them big time and even if the camera was a complete write off I was happy.
When I got the camera home I tried simply prying the mirror down. It snapped into place where it should be and suddenly I had a camera I could view through. I then took the two batteries out and found one was reasonably good (1.3V) and the other needed replacement. I cleaned the battery compartment and polished the surfaces on both the old and a relatively new battery I happened to have. I installed the batteries and switched the camera’s on/off switch to on. Nothing. The camera was
dead. So I took the bottom off. There was very little to see inside so I took a subassembly up to see what lay beneath. The subassembly includes the battery compartment and it has wires so I could only lift the subassembly up a little, but it was far enough to show me the levers were all doing their jobs.
After leaving the camera for a couple of hours I thought I should just confirm the voltages of the two batteries. Luckily one battery was just at the one volt level, so I selected a stronger battery and reinstalled the new pair. Everything came to life. The X-370 uses red LED along the right side of the screen to indicate shutter speeds, if you are in manual mode and if the shutter speed is going to be longer than 1 second. If you are in manual mode a solid LED lights to show the shutter speed you have chosen and a flashing LED shows the shutter speed the camera thinks you should use.
Speaking of LED’s, the camera has a cute arrangement on one switch. If you move it up—it will stay up until moved down again—when you press the shutter release the self-timer LED will flash as it counts your ten second delay (it flashes quickly just before it fires the shutter). If you press the same slider down it will lock the exposure.
There is a lot to really like about this camera. It is the lowest model in a progression of “X” cameras that started with the X-700, went to the X-570 and arrived at this model. There were a couple of models after this X-370. Although the lens can be locked at the f/22 (identified in green) for full automatic operation in the other two cameras—this X-370 does not work that way. Basically you chose the f/stop you would like to use and the camera will pick the shutter speed. If the camera’s shutter speed is too slow to hand hold, or the shutter speed would have to be faster than the 1000 sec the camera can expose at, its up to you to chose a better f/stop. You run the aperture, the camera runs the shutter speeds. Or you can set a shutter speed and then adjust the aperture to get the LED’ in the viewfinder to line up.
This camera has a lot of plastic in it but that is not a bad thing. Everything operates well and looks to be holding up well for a camera from 1984-1989.
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