Minolta

~ the obituary ~

The camera in a Turkish house in the nineties was a compact you loaded with film and handed across a counter, and the prints came back a few days later in an envelope with the negatives in a paper sleeve. An SLR was a specialist object owned by people who called themselves photographers. Minolta made both kinds. The second kind was a purchase most households in that market never made.

The company was seventy-eight years old when it stopped. It started in Osaka in 1928 as a Japanese-German camera shop founded by Kazuo Tashima, and took the name Minolta in 1931, an acronym the company assembled out of its own equipment vocabulary with Tashima's name attached at the end. For most of the twentieth century it sat among the names that mattered in Japanese cameras.

The landmarks are real. The SR-2 in 1958 was its first SLR, and the SR-T 101 in 1966 put through-the-lens metering at a price ordinary people could reach. The CLE in 1981 was a compact 35mm rangefinder good enough that Leica owners still argue about it. Then in 1985 the Maxxum 7000 became the first 35mm SLR with the autofocus motor inside the body, and that is the one that changed what came after it.

That last one is why the name is worth a grave. Autofocus in the body meant every lens on the mount focused itself, and within a few years everyone else had copied the arrangement. Minolta got there first and then spent twenty years failing to convert being first into being biggest.

~ the case file ~

~ what it cost ~

Honeywell sued in 1987, claiming the autofocus system infringed patents it held. In 1991 Minolta was ordered to pay 127.6 million dollars in damages and associated costs. That is an enormous number for a camera company in 1991, and it landed at the precise moment Minolta should have been spending everything it had on holding the lead it had just taken.

The rest of the Japanese camera industry read the verdict and adjusted. Everybody who wanted body-integrated autofocus after that licensed their way in. Minolta paid for the privilege of having shipped before the legal ground was settled, which is a thing that happens to whoever goes first.

~ the merger ~

Konica and Minolta announced a merger in January 2003 and completed it that August. On paper it was two mid-sized Japanese imaging companies combining to survive the switch to digital. In practice the combined company had a copier business that made money and a camera business that did not, and anyone could see which one was going to be defended.

On 19 January 2006 Konica Minolta announced it was leaving photography. The SLR line and the service operation went to Sony from 31 March. The full exit finished on 30 September with around 3,700 jobs cut, and in March 2007 the film and photographic paper production stopped as well. Seventy-eight years, closed out in fourteen months.

~ what it became ~

Sony did not throw the mount away. The Alpha system it launched in 2006 used Minolta's A-mount, so a lens bought for a Maxxum in 1990 went straight onto a Sony body sixteen years later. For a while that was the best available outcome for a dead camera brand. The glass kept working even though the name on the front had gone.

Konica Minolta still exists and makes office printers and medical imaging equipment. The trademark itself was sold on in 2017 and now turns up on unrelated consumer goods, which is the usual retirement for a name that used to mean something. The cameras are on shelves in secondhand shops, and the lenses are still being adapted onto bodies that did not exist when they were made.

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