Minolta Camera Repair

Minolta Co., Ltd. (Minolta) was a manufacturer of cameras, camera accessories, laser printers, fax machines, and photocopiers. Minolta was founded in 1928 in Osaka, Japan as Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shōten (Japanese-German camera shop). In 1931, the company changed its name to Minolta, which is an acronym for “Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima.”

Minolta sold its first bellows camera, called the Nifcarette, in 1929. The Nifcarette relied heavily on German camera technology. The company developed its first single-lens reflex camera in 1958. Minolta developed the first integrated autofocus 35-millimeter single-lens reflex (SLR) camera system. In 1962, John Glenn took a modified Minolta Hi-Matic camera aboard the Friendship 7 to take pictures of space. The Minolta XD-11 (known as the XD-7 worldwide) was introduced in 1977 as the world’s first ‘multi-mode’ SLR camera. In 2003, Minolta and Konica merged to form Konica Minolta Holdings, Inc. In 2006, the company left the camera and photo business and sold a portion of its SLR camera business to Sony.

Konica Minolta released its final camera models, the Dimage X1 and Z6 in 2006 after 78 years as a camera manufacturer. Minolta cameras can generally be identified by the name “Minolta” in either capital or lower-case letters on the front of the camera’s body, above the lens. Konica Minolta cameras include the name “Konica Minolta” above the camera’s lens.

• Wikipedia: Minolta
• Wikipedia: Konica Minolta
• List of Minolta Cameras