I seem to have acquired a number of point and shoot cameras recently more by accident than by design. To be honest I don’t really enjoy the ‘limited’ and ‘compromised’ experience these kind of cameras give or so I thought. Well this may be changing, and I have the Minolta Riva Zoom 135ex to thank for that.
Light and compact and very plastic, but incredibly comfortable in the hand due to its well thought out design.
It features a zoom range from 38mm, above, to 135 mm, below,
It really is an amazing feat of engineering how Minolta were able to design such a compact camera in 1994 and yet feature such a focal length.
Unusually the film is loaded into the right of the camera and fed onto the takeup spool on the right. Of course it features the dreaded DX coding only.😞 I suppose you can’t have everything your own way.
Looking through the viewfinder and all you get is a central focus point and close framing guide for when you are using macro mode. To the right of the viewfinder window there are two LED’s. The top glows green when focus is confirmed. If it blinks quickly then your too close, blink slowly and the contrast is too low. The lower orange LED will glow when the flash is going to be used. If it should blink slowly then it’s warning you there will be camera shake. Cool!
Looking to the top plate of the camera, above. Starting on the top left and you can cycle through flash, fill flash, cancel flash and exposure compensation of + 1.5 ev for back lit subject(which you could also use to allow for out of date film) By default the flash will be always be on.
Then below the flash button is the red eye reduction button
On the top right and you can choose from self timer, continuous drive, double exposure 😲😲 and remote control.
Bottom right button allows you to choose which program you want to use. These include, auto, macro, portrait, night portrait, Thank you/ Take me mode and finally spot metering mode. Wait a minute what is Thank you/ Take me mode? According to the manual – ” When you ask someone who is unfamiliar eith the camera to take your picture, select Thank you/ Take me mode. The camera automatically zooms the lens to 38mm for a wide view and limits the focusing range to ensure that you will be in focus’
It’s worth pointing out that in Macro mode the lens extends to 90mm and cannot be moved. In all the other modes the zoom can be changed.
In the image above I used macro mode and the flash was set to auto.
Auto mode in operation in the image above.
In fairness I failed to realise what the orange LED was trying to tell me, namely I was toooo close!
I thought I had everything in the viewfinder for the image above, clearly I didn’t. Shame because I really like this image.
In its review, found here, Popular Photography concluded ‘The Freedom Zoom 135EX( as it was also known as) has the optics and electronics of a superzoom, but the simplicity and ease of operation of a pocket zoom…’
That just about sums it up. As someone who hasn’t enjoyed using a point and shoot I have to admit to enjoying the experience. This was enhanced at seeing the results. I picked up my working example for not much money. I can’t quite belive what I am about to say but ….I would thoroughly recommend this camera.😲
arhphotographic 