Sony Alpha 900 & Konica Minolta lenses

[Dave Gurtcheff]

Does anyone know if the Konica Minolta f3.5 Macro MD manual focus lens will work on the Alpha  900? Very inexpensive lens listed new on B&H site at $219.95 (imported).
I know the old Minolta Rokkors will not fit without an adapter that has a lens in it to achieve infinity focus, but I know nothing about "MD" series lenses.
Thanks in advance
Dave Gurtcheff
Beach Haven, NJ

[Thwack]

Dave,

SR/MC/MD lenses will not work on A mount.  You need to use an optical adapter which completely defeats the lens, and will have no automation. Or you need to do a mount swap, which will still result in no automation.

Don't even bother with that old lens.  Just buy the Sony 2.8/50 macro. It's the same as the Minolta 2.8/50 macro and very good.  Since you don't own one of those old MD lenses, there is no reason to bother with them at all.

EPd,

BH refers to them as KM lenses. It's just simpler for them to do that than have Minolta and Konicia-Minolta as separate listings.  And for a lot of items there is so little of either left it doesn't much matter.   Also they have had the header as Konica-Minolta in the past even when most the lenses shipped by KM were straight up Minolta.  There was only ever 5 lenses made with the KM badging on them  (17-35, 28-75, 11-18, 18-70, 18-200) all others were still Minoltas even during the minolta times.  The evolution of the mount makes things messy, but in the end, just like when companies buy another company. Everything becomes the current.  So Minolta stuff became Konica Minolta even if it still said Minolta.

[Dave Gurtcheff]

Thanks for the help. I noted there are a ton of pristine 50mm f1.7 Minolta AF lenses on ebay and very reasonable. I purchased one for about $85.
Thanks
Dave

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Just a small addition for the historically minded. The original Minolta lenses were MC Rokkors, MC standing for Meter Coupled in connection with the introduction of the Minolta ST-T 101. In connection with the Minolta XD-7/XD-11 an additional tab was included on the lens needed for the automatic aperture stop down mechanism. These lenses were MD-lenses. Somewhere along the path the Rokkor name was dropped in favor of the Minolta label.

Minolta introduced the AF-system in 1985, and with that came a new and incompatible lens mount, the present Minolta/KM/Sony AF mount.

Best regards
Erik

Does anyone know if the Konica Minolta f3.5 Macro MD manual focus lens will work on the Alpha  900? Very inexpensive lens listed new on B&H site at $219.95 (imported).
I know the old Minolta Rokkors will not fit without an adapter that has a lens in it to achieve infinity focus, but I know nothing about "MD" series lenses.
Thanks in advance
Dave Gurtcheff
Beach Haven, NJ

[Dave Gurtcheff]

Hi,

Just a small addition for the historically minded. The original Minolta lenses were MC Rokkors, MC standing for Meter Coupled in connection with the introduction of the Minolta ST-T 101. In connection with the Minolta XD-7/XD-11 an additional tab was included on the lens needed for the automatic aperture stop down mechanism. These lenses were MD-lenses. Somewhere along the path the Rokkor name was dropped in favor of the Minolta label.

Minolta introduced the AF-system in 1985, and with that came a new and incompatible lens mount, the present Minolta/KM/Sony AF mount.

Best regards
Erik

Thanks for the history Erik. I've owned just about every brand of camera from Leica M and R, Hasselblad 500C etc, etc, to Nikon, Canon, Contax,  Pentax, Olympus, etc, but never Minolta for some reason.
Dave