Based on Leitz's (aka, Leica) Correphot prototype (back in 1976, the name is a combination of "correlated" and "photo"), Minolta successfully launched world's earliest mass-produced autofocus SLR camera body in 1985.

Starting from 1987, Honeywell filed a series of patent infringement suits against Minolta and other camera manufactures. Honeywell won the suits, and Minolta paid huge quantities of money to Honeywell. From today's perspective, many people from camera industry believe Honeywell's suits to be abuse of patent laws.

The Minolta autofocus film SLRs were quite impressive. My favourite models are α-7000, α-9000, α-807si, α-9xi, α-9 and α-7. One stupid thing about Minolta α SLR is the "smart card" design, though sounds futuristic, it is not user-friendly at all by any standard.

Starting from 1995, the introduction of Casio liveview-enabled digital camera (QV-10) brought a wave of compact digital camera revolution. Consumer electronic giants like Panasonic and Sony started to eat more and more market shares as everything starts to be digital.

Konica lost its place in SLR market after the unsuccessful FS-1, the first camera with automatic film winding motor but extremely easy to fail (probably due to the bad quality control of film production). Minolta was badly hurt by the Honeywell lawsuit, and the competition in camera market was becoming increasingly intense in late 1990s. These two companies merged in 2003 to form a better, and profitable organization. Camera business is the origin for both companies, but they had to shift their focus to printers to make a living due to their loss of advantage in the digital era.

The A-mount, debuted in 1985, has electric contacts for information exchange, but aperture lever and focus motors are linked in a mechanical way. It was designed in such a way because motors were not small enough to fit into lens bodies back in 1985. Somehow, Canon EOS system developers found ways to do so in 1987 and introduced world's first fully electronic SLR mount -- EF mount. (In aviation industry, such coupling mechanism is called "fly-by-wire".)

The first camera body to support motor-inside lens in α system was Dynax/Maxxum/α-7, but it was 13 years later after the debut of EOS 650. Backward compatiblity severly limited A-mount camera bodies' feature for video recording, such as smooth and precise aperture control and stable continuous autofocus. Even the latest LA-EA5 adaptor is unable to resolve these issues completely.

Sony's attempt to make interchangeable lens camera started in 1980s. The Sony Mavica (using Mavipak, which was later standardized as Video Floppy) was among the first commercialized digital cameras. All Sony Mavica cameras were without complicated reflex mirror structure. In 1996, Sony started to make Cyber-shot cameras, and in 1997, Digital Mavica cameras were also released.

Around 2003, the cost of making an APS-C CMOS started to fall to a point that is affordable for the professional market. As Canon and Nikon began to launch their affordable entry-level DSLRs, and the price of high-end DSLRs start to fall, high-end Sony bridge cameras had difficulty in maintaining market share. Both DSC-F828 and DSC-R1 were technically brilliant but commercially ordinary models. Sony began its collaboration with Konica Minolta to develop DSLRs in 2005, and acquired the camera business from Konica Minolta in 2006. The first Sony α, α100 was almost an exact copy of Konica Minolta Dynax/Maxxum/α-5D.

In 2008, Panasonic launched first modern mirrorless camera, Lumix G1. In 2010, Samsung launched first APS-C mirrorless camera, NX10. Sony's answer to this new region of market was the introduction of NEX-5/NEX-3. The popularity of NEX series was out of Sony's expectation. Sony's original prospect on professional market was to use more electronized A-mount camera bodies, the ones with translucent mirrors, to participate the compitition. But the market's reaction to high-end NEX models, such as NEX-7 and later NEX-6, led directly to the birth of full-frame mirrorless α7 and α7R.

"Journey upstream the Flow of Light and Time" is a series of video about camera history. This episode is more like a trailer of what would be discussed in future videos. Please stay tuned for more upcoming episodes!

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