Konica Minolta, Inc. is a Japanese multinational technology company headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, with offices in 49 countries worldwide. The company manufactures business and industrial imaging products, including copiers, laser printers, multi-functional peripherals (MFPs) and digital print systems for the production printing market. Konica Minolta's Managed Print Service (MPS) is called Optimised Print Services. The company also makes optical devices, including lenses and LCD film; medical and graphic imaging products, such as X-ray image processing systems, colour proofing systems, and X-ray film; photometers, 3-D digitizers, and other sensing products; and textile printers. It once had camera and photo operations inherited from Konica and Minolta but they were sold in 2006 to Sony, with Sony's Alpha series being the successor SLR division brand.
Minolta Co., Ltd. was a Japanese manufacturer of cameras, camera accessories, photocopiers, fax machines, and laser printers. Minolta Co., Ltd., which is also known simply as Minolta, was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1928 as Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shōten. It made the first integrated autofocus 35 mm SLR camera system. In 1931, the company adopted its final name, an acronym for "Mechanism, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima".
Konica was a Japanese manufacturer of, among other products, film, film cameras, camera accessories, photographic and photo-processing equipment, photocopiers, fax machines and laser printers, founded in 1873. The company merged with Japanese peer Minolta in 2003, with the new company named Konica Minolta.
A digital single-lens reflex camera is a digital camera that combines the optics and the mechanisms of a single-lens reflex camera with a digital imaging sensor.
The NikonD50 is a 6.1-megapixel entry-level digital single-lens reflex camera, sold from June 2005 until November 2006 by Nikon. It was Nikon's first DSLR aimed at the consumer market, and sold for US$899. It uses the Nikon F mount. The D50 is similar to the slightly older D70 using the same CCD sensor, with a slower maximum shutter speed and slightly smaller size; however, it continued to offer the internal focus motor of prior autofocus film and digital SLRs. Future entry-level Nikon DSLRs would eliminate the internal focus motor and require these motors to be in the lenses. Lack of a focus-motor in the camera eliminated the ability to autofocus with late film-era Nikkor AF and AF-D lenses, though these lenses work well on the D50.
The Minolta Dimâge EX is a digital camera, first marketed in 1998. Similar to the earlier Minolta Dimâge V of 1996, the Dimâge EX line was one of the first consumer point-and-shoot cameras released in the American market and featured an unusual interchangeable lens system not normally found in point-and-shoot cameras.
Image stabilization (IS) is a family of techniques that reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or other imaging device during exposure.
Sony α is a digital camera system introduced on 5 June 2006. It uses and expands upon Konica Minolta camera technologies, including the Minolta AF SLR lens mount, whose assets were acquired by Sony after the end of Konica Minolta's photography operations in early 2006. Sony also has an 11.08% ownership stake in Japanese lens manufacturer Tamron, which is known to have partnered with Konica Minolta and Sony in the design and manufacture of many zoom lenses.
The Sigma SD14 is a digital single-lens reflex camera produced by the Sigma Corporation of Japan. It is fitted with a Sigma SA mount which takes Sigma SA lenses.
The Maxxum 7D, labelled Dynax 7D in Europe/Hong Kong and α-7 Digital in Japan and officially named "DG-7D", is a 6.1 megapixel digital single-lens reflex camera, or DSLR, produced by Konica Minolta. It was the top model of their DSLR range; the Maxxum/Dynax 5D consumer-grade model was the other.
The Minolta A-mount camera system was a line of photographic equipment from Minolta introduced in 1985 with the world's first integrated autofocus system in the camera body with interchangeable lenses. The system used a lens mount called A-mount, with a flange focal distance 44.50 mm, one millimeter longer, 43.5 mm, than the previous SR mount from 1958. The new mount was wider, 49.7 mm vs. 44.97 mm, than the older SR-mount and had a longer flange focal distance making old manual lenses incompatible with the new system. Minolta bought the autofocus technology of Leica Correfot camera which was partly used on the a-mount autofocus technology. The mount is now used by Sony, who bought the SLR camera division from Konica Minolta, Konica and Minolta having merged a few years before.
The Minolta Dimage 7, 7i, 7Hi series is a "pro-sumer" line of digital electronic viewfinder cameras from Minolta. These are also known as bridge digital cameras. They are capable of capturing images in the 5-megapixel range.
The Minolta DiMAGE 5 is a "pro-sumer" digital bridge camera, utilising both an electronic viewfinder and LCD back. It is capable of capturing images at 3.3 megapixel range.
DiMAGE A2 is a digital camera which was manufactured by Konica Minolta, announced on February 12, 2004.
The Konica Hexar RF is a 35 mm rangefinder camera which was sold by Konica. It was introduced to the market on 13 October 1999. and subsequently discontinued some time before the end of 2003. The camera used the "Bayonet Konica KM-mount", a copy of the Leica M-mount, thus sharing interchangeable lenses with those designed for Leica cameras and others compatible with them. The Hexar RF has a combined rangefinder/viewfinder modeled on that of Leica cameras, a similar body shape and size - and so is similar to Leica M-mount cameras in many aspects of operation.
Sony α100 (DSLR-A100) is the first digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) marketed by Sony in 2006. It is the successor to the previous Konica Minolta DSLR models through Sony's purchase of the Konica Minolta camera division. The α100 retains a similar body design and claimed improvements on Konica Minolta's Anti-Shake sensor-shifting image stabilization feature, renamed Super SteadyShot. It uses a 10.2 megapixel APS-C sized CCD sensor. Another notable feature inherited from Konica Minolta is Eyestart, which provides for automatic autofocus activation by detecting the presence of the photographer's eye on the viewfinder, thus quickening the camera's response.
The Sony α NEX-5 is a digital camera launched on 11 May 2010. It is a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with the body size of a larger model fairly compact point-and-shoot camera with a larger sensor size (APS-C) comparable to that of some digital single-lens reflex cameras. Its major competitors in the market are the cameras based on the micro 4/3 standard created by Panasonic and Olympus, and a few low end Canon, Nikon, and even Sony α DSLRs. The NEX-5 shoots 14.2 megapixel stills and has a 7 frame/s continuous shotmode. It has the capability to shoot 1920×1080i at 60 frame/s in AVCHD or 1440×1080p at 30 frame/s in MPEG4. The NEX-5 was replaced by the 16 megapixel NEX-5N in August 2011.
CxProcess is the trademark of an image processing technology used in Minolta and Konica Minolta digital cameras.
