Photography

Made in Japan

The Globalization of the Camera industry: It Became Everybody’s Business

This post is a companion to the latest 3DLANES podcast episode. The camera started as a precision artifact. German. Exclusive. Built by hand in the same tradition as Swiss watchmaking, meaning it was expensive, it was serious, and most people couldn’t touch it. Leica, Zeiss, Rollei. That was the holy trinity. And like a fine […]

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Minolta XG-M

The Minolta XG-M: A Piece of Photography History, Today

October 1981.The manual-focus SLR market was mature, crowded, and tightening. Feature differentiation was incremental, competition was fierce, and margins were compressing. Minolta needed a camera that could defend its position in the mid-tier consumer segment without overextending into professional territory. Enter the Minolta XG-M, marketed in Japan as the X-70 and arriving there in 1982,

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