Quite a few years ago I was gifted a Minolta Dynax 500si. The donor had sold the lens on its own so the body came to me “because I do film photography stuff”. I already owned a couple of manual focus Minoltas but I realised the lenses had a different mount and so the camera was put away in a cupboard. I had quite a few other cameras but it niggled me that I couldn’t do anything with this Auto Focus body.
Fast forward about three years and I spotted this Dynax 300si in a charity shop with two lenses: a rather dirty Minolta 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 and a cleaner Tamron 80-210mm f4.5-5.6. The total price was £10 so at long last I had some AF lenses to try on my 500si. I realised the 300si was program only so I didn’t bother trying it out immediately.
Fast forward again to the end of 2021 when I retired and decided to set up a Youtube Channel, teach myself home processing and to just get out there shooting as many cameras from my collection as possible. The Dynax camera had only ever had one outing so I decided to try it with some Ilford HP5 Plus. My home town has an annual event called “Blyth Battery Goes to War” with beach invasions and displays of old military vehicles and equipment, which I thought would be a good subject to shoot. The event was a lot of fun and I eagerly developed the film in Ilfosol 3 as soon as I got home.
The Dynax 300si was designed to give well focused, accurate exposures whenever the shutter was released, and that’s exactly what it does. The exposure modes are program, portrait, close-up, landscape, action and night portrait. Focusing is reasonably quick and it is easy to see what you are focusing on. The only minor irritations I have with this camera are unintentional flash firing and the auto-rewind takes the film leader all the way into the cartridge, but other than that it is pleasant to use and gives excellent results.
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