Gear nostalgia part 3 - Konica T3 Autoreflex

(Continued from part two) The Konica Autoreflex was the first camera that offered auto-exposure with shutter speed preference. It had a bayonet mount, got good reviews and was very robustly built. Some downsides were that the shutter had a very hard sound and the viewfinder was relatively small (however big with todays DSLR standards) and not very bright, but altogether the camera seemed like the perfect candidate to me. I should mention that the professional cameras at the time - Nikon F2, Canon F1, Leicaflex, was so far beyond my economical reach that I never even considered them. They were much more expensive than the high end amateur cameras.
I invested in a powerful flash, a handheld Rollei with bounce capability - one of the first flash units on the market with this feature.
As for lenses, I bought a 50 1.8 with the camera. As a wide angle I choose a Vivitar 28 2.5 and for tele use the then brand new Vivitar series 1 70-210 F 3.5 Macro zoom. Vivitar constantly scored top ratings in Modern Photography, with resolution values deemed “excellent” more often than the lenses from the top camera brands like Nikon, Canon, Minolta, etc. However, there was a catch to this, which I will come to later.

Some months later I realized I wasnt really happy with this set-up either. I got more and more assaignments and many of these were sports. The 70-210 F 3.5 was not fast enough in stadium light and it had very low contrast wide open. The big lens was akward to handle with the grip-less camera body. Auto exposure showed itself to be a two-edged sword. It was fine with color slides, but not with push processed high speed B&W film which tolerated no underexposure at all. Thats the reason why newspaper photographers always used manual exposure in these days. The Konica had a mode for manual match needle metering, but it was clumsy and not very convinient.
Swedish pros Conny Torstensson (first from the left) and Björn Andersson (third from left) on the bench of FC Bayern Munic. Konica T3, 50 F1.8.

So what should I get now? The Olympus OM-1 intrigued me, but the professional motordrive was so expensive that a camera/motor combo was far out of reach, just as with the Nikon/Canon pro models. A good friend of mine had a Minolta SRT 101. I was very impressed by the image quality, above all the high contrast. In a test I read regarding SLRs with 50 F1.4 lenses, the sister model SRT 303 beat all the competition, including Nikkormat, Pentax Spotmatic , Canon Ftb, Olympus OM-1 on the grounds of image quality wide open. As a side note Modern Photography now had revised their lens tests and added the very important image quality parameter “contrast”. Now it showed that the Vivitars or other third party lenses did not fare so well against the top camera makers. Appearently these choose another balance between contrast and resolution. Anyway - time to try Minolta. (Next chapter)