Ladies and Gentlemen: The Minolta Hi-Matic GF

This is the camera Dona brought into our collection. It was her very first camera which she got from her mother when she was about 10 years old. I've used it to cover the 1st november gatherings at our graveyard using an old cheap colour film. Later we loaded an old roll of Ilford HP5+ and took it to Prague as well as to skiing.

It's cheaply built and feels very light. The lens is fixed focal at 38mm and with a maximum aperture of f/4 which is set on the lens by moving a slider from sunny (probably f/16) over partly cloudy (probably f/8) to cloudy (f/4). You can set ISO film speed to be either 100 or 400 on a second slider (this probably switches between two exposure times). Focus is adjustable in 4 steps: head and shoulders, head and torso, whole person and mountains. That and a viewfinder that leaves you guessing a bit are all the controls that you have. It doesn't require batteries except for the flash.

I love to manually forward the film and that silent and short click when the shutter opens and the film is exposed. No waiting for Autofocus to finish, no waiting for the lens to extend, no waiting for the picture to be written to the card.

Following are some samples that I'd like to point you too:

The blurring of the person was actually a mistake as I forgot to adjust the focus resulting in a photo that I immediately fell in love with. DSLRs and modern cameras often prevent me from these accidents.
 

As I said framing is often a bit of a guess, but sometimes such small errors are what I think gives characters to these pictures (not to mention my uncle of course!)
 

Another one that I liked a lot from the one role that we carried to Prague, back home and to the ski ressort. 36 pictures are a lot more than we think when we are used to take a couple of 100 pictures from our memory cards and put them on the computer.

My conclusion: Cheap and with limited possibilities, probably bad per pixel sharpness, distortions, crude aperture and shutter speed settings, no light meter, no LCD and nothing that prevents you from making an error. A great camera.