From Peter Blaise Re[2]: j.. s.. g..@y...c.. wrote: Minolta teleconverters

[Peter Blaise Monahon]

j.. s.. g..@y...c.. wrote:

Mr. Blaise,

I was looking at a web sight where you were talking about teleconverters. You mentioned that minolta made two over time. I recently bought a 1.5 teleconverter by minolta. It appears fairly new still being in the case. It screws into a 49mm lens and has a 46mm adaptor. It has the rubber grip around it like all minolta lens. I cannot find out anything about this, any ideas?

 

Hi JSg,

 

Let's share this with a few Minolta chat groups to see if anyone else has insight and you can check in to find out more - see the additional TO: email entries above.

 

Take a picture of it and show me - if it screws onto the FRONT of a lens, then it's a ... what?  Diopter?  A teleconverting "adapter"?  Technically, a "teleconverter" goes between the camera body and a removable primary lens, pushing the primary lens further out, and the adapter includes another lens element (or group of lens elements) inside it that compensates for the primary lens's additional distance from the camera body, providing the possibility for infinity focus (otherwise, a lens pushed so far from a camera body can only close-focus).  Also, there may be some other markings on the adapter?  What else does it have written on it?

 

At http://www.geocities.com/peterblaise/minoltamf/ where I say "Minolta made 2", I was referring ONLY to the Minolta adapters for fitting Minolta's original 35mm film manual focus SLR lenses to their (then) new 1985 Minolta 35mm film auto focus cameras.  Since the Minolta auto focus camera bodies are thicker (deeper from front to back) than are Minolta's manual focus SLR camera bodies, directly fitting a manual focus lens would have it sticking out too far from the film (or now from the digital sensor) and would only allow the lens to provide close focus - no infinity focus.  So they made adapters with lens elements in them to compensate and return the full range of focus from closeup to infinity, and those lens elements inside the adapters effectively make the adapters "teleconverters".  Very quickly, Minolta's own auto focus lenses became available and quite popular and there was then scant little demand for adapters for their olders lenses to fit to their newer cameras, hence my web page researching this now rare item.

 

Minolta (and Tamron and Sigma and other manufacturers) also made many teleconverters for auto focus cameras and lenses that work exactly as any other SLR teleconverters and fit auto focus SLR lenses to auto focus SLR camera bodies that those original auto focus SLR lenses fit anyway.  Of course, the teleconverter magnifies the resulting image so, for instance, with a 2x teleconverter, a 50mm lens acts like a 100mm lens.  I was not referring to Minolta's general production of teleconverters, only "adapters" for fitting older manual focus SLR lenses to newer auto focus SLR cameras.

 

Anything marked "Minolta" that fits on the front of a lens (into the 49mm front filter thread, and if it comes with a 46mm adapter, then it can fit a variety of lens fronts, especially the Vectis line of APS-film cameras) would technically be an "adapter", and if it magnifies the image, it may be called a "teleconverter" by it's maker.  I imagine it's intended for the front of a fixed lens that otherwise does not come off the camera body, and therefore a "regular" teleconverter can't be fit between the lens and the camera body.  Many of Minolta's HiMatic and Capios/Freedom/Riva and Vectis and other series of "compact" cameras have permently mounted, non-removable lenses, and so Minolta and others made many accessories for them, including "teleconverting" adapters for the front of the lenses on these cameras.  Perhaps that is the intended purpose for the item you found.

 

Finally, if the markings mean "for minolta" rather than "BY minolta" then it may be a specialized construct that best fits one particular Minolta camera, such as the "teleconverting" 1.5x adapter lens that fits onto the front of, say, the Minolta DiMage 5/7/A-series digital camera and magnifies the image 1.5x so the 50mm lens "behaves" or "sees" like a 75mm lens, or, in 35mm equivalent lens-angle-of-view/capture, a 200mm-equivalent lens "sees" as if it were a 300mm-equivalent lens.

 

Let me know more of what's written on it and show me a picture - I'd be quite interested to see.  Also, of course, of there's a box or any numbers on the case, please share whatever detailed information you can find on it!

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Click!  Love and hugs,  Peter Blaise, Minolta Rokkor Alpha DiMage Photographer http://www.peterblaisephotography.com/