I picked up a Minolta Hi-Matic F from the early 1970s in beautiful cosmetic condition a few months ago and shot a roll of film before checking light seals, only to notice when I was done that they were almost completely gone. I won’t make that mistake again! So I ordered a light seal kit from US Camera and set about fixing up my first rangefinder! The kit seemed perfectly cut and after replacing it I set about shooting a second roll, a 24 exposure roll of Ilford HP5 Plus 400, which is what you’ll see in this post. I didn’t want to shoot a full 36 frames in case I messed up the light seal replacement, so this little roll of HP5 was just the thing.
Aside from teaching me a valuable lesson about always checking the light seals on a vintage camera, that first roll taught me that the Hi-Matic F tends to underexpose frames. This is because the original batteries that it was designed to work with are no longer made. You can use modern batteries with adapters (or aluminum foil) to get them to fit the battery compartment, but the voltage is higher than the original batteries and that causes the light meter to underexpose by somewhere around one stop. With most vintage cameras you can use a separate meter and manual settings, or you can dial exposure compensation, but the Hi-Matic F features all-automatic exposure. The only thing you can do to adjust is set the film speed to slower than the box speed. In this case I set it to 200 while using a 400 speed film, and I think that pretty much nailed all of the exposures. I got 26 frames out of this 24 frame roll and only the first and fifth were exposed poorly. Pretty impressive for a 40 year old fully automatic camera! I’m using LR44 batteries and a pair of 3d-printed adapters that came with the camera from the dealer on ebay.
I prefer a more manual shooting experience and I wish this had exposure compensation (at least), but it’s a beautiful little camera and I think the lens does a great job. It may not be one of my forever cameras but I’ll probably put at least a couple more rolls of film through before passing it along.
Gallery: Minolta Hi-Matic F around Vermont on Ilford HP5 Plus 400
