Bought a Minolta 7000 in 1985, had various other Minolta’s until their demise, happy memories.
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Didn’t Minolta morph into Sony.
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Eventually Yes, sold to Sony in 2006.
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I wish I could say the same, I had one Minolta, 800Si and I just could not get on with it, I much preferred the handling of my Pentax, Canon and Nikon film cameras.
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The strange thing is that R5 II will be another consumer camera, like it predecessor - professionals only use R6 and R3 for better low light and image quality. There is zero need for much over 20Mp.
The R1 is likely to be a large sensor too (I no longer follow Canon stuff, there may have been leaks?), so again, little use for sports, but good for product shoots and consumers to compose shots after the taking.
Minolta auto focus cameras promised, but rarely delivered in my experience. Just reading those brochures again made me smile. Always fancied a 9xi just for the idea of pretending to be a pro.
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This is very much dependent on what your role as a professional photographer is, for sports what you say is true but for fashion and product shoots a R5 would be far more appropriate. A friend has just retired from being a fashion photographer and swore by his R5.
In a lot of cases this is absolutely true, I understand 45mp in certain circumstances but for posting on social media it’s massively OTT, but then 10mp is enough for social media.
Overall I think 24mp is a sweet spot, more than enough pixels and manageable file sizes.
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I agree, this will depend on the sub-genre within fashion: someone shooting high end ‘art’ fashion work in the vein of John Swanell, or Rankin, for example would absolutely want an R5 or probably an R1 going forwards. My fashion colleagues in ‘production’ fashion swear by the smaller resolution R6 / II bodies for speed and versatility, without the overly large files (says he, who used to shoot with a Phase One back on a digital Hasselblad 20 years ago…)
Life changes.
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The rumour is the R1 will only be 24MP and more sport focussed.
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The Minolta 7000 was perfect for me, who had been used to point and shoot pocket camera’s I had been travelling round Europe in my early 20’s taken loads of photo’s but wanted better quality photo’s, a couple more models from Minolta followed, before I purchased a Sony DSC P10.
A Sony A6000 followed and I currently have the Sony A6600, you have probably sussed by now, they are all AF models, Manual settings, haven’t a Scooby do!
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Update: Have found a local guy who will build for me. May yet refine a couple of bits but copying and pasting the basics:
i5 12400 CPU with 6/12 threads
32 Gb DDR4 RAM 3200mhz
2 TB NVME drive 2000MBs + 2TB SSD
RTX 3050 8GB Graphics card with hardware acceleration for Adobe products
All in a nice discrete case, suitable power supply, wifi, Windows 11
Approx cost £790
Seems alright to me.
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I’d push on for an i7 processor and at least a 3060 graphics card if you plan on using any AI tools (Lightroom DeNoise or Topaz Photo AI for example).
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Sounds like a sensible setup Jamie. The only thing I would emphasise is that GPU is far more important than CPU, particularly for Adobe purposes and specifically LR / PS and Pr. Illustrator is a law unto itself and InDesign works with most things. 8Gb was pretty much the standard / higher end when I last purchased an Intel machine in '19. If you can stretch yourself to a 16 or even a 32GB GPU, I would say that you are future-proofing yourself for longer. Ditto drives - can you go beyond the 2000Mb/s NVME? I would suggest faster and smaller for that (it should not be a storage drive), so 1Tb and then keep the SSD external for flexibility…?
Indeed, just a couple of steps up I feel.
You come across like you know more hands on than I do, could you list a spec I could copy and paste for him?!
Cheers
Thanks for the heads-up, I’ve not been watching the rumours as I dipped out of Canon after decades of Pro use.
I’m Mac only, both Intel and M so I’m extrapolating from that knowledge + I have a great deal of software experience. Software dependency on Graphics processing will only grow, so we will see 64 / 128Gb graphics in short order.
Intel i7
Fast board
16Gb GPU
32Gb RAM (expandable)
1Tb or similar internal NVMe (fastest is currently 10Gbs, Intel Optane DC P5800X 800GB, may be very expensive)
External SSD Storage drive 1050Mbs or 2000Mbs (keep Lightroom Classic catalogue and settings on the external SSD and keep it backed up).
Everything is budget dependent.
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Thank you very much.
A ‘fast’ board?
rtx 4060ti 16gb graphics, faster nvme and i7 12700 cpu, adds approx £500. So £1,300 all in…
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