A Roll of Film with the Minolta Talker

In the 1980’s, Minolta made a camera called the Talker. It was advanced in that it contained a voice chip, and responded to certain conditions by verbally warning you. It might say things like, “Too dark, use flash” or “Load film”.

It was simple, and fun, and it was a decent auto focus, auto exposure camera for everyone. I remember that my wife had one, and somehow it dropped or was broken in some way, and I remember her talking about it and missing her “Talker”.

Since I found one online, and it was relatively inexpensive, I thought I’d buy it to play with, and maybe give it to my wife as a gift.

Anyway, here’s some of the shots my wife took. I think they look really nice for a point and shoot type camera. She used Kodak Ektar 100 film.

In conclusion, I would say this is a wonderful camera for my wife – or anyone who doesn’t want to bother with focusing, or manual exposure control, or lenses. There is no zoom, just the standard 35mm f/2.8 lens (which is quite reasonable for most shooting). Results are quite nice. It’s also a nice little camera to introduce children to film photography. I always liked handing a camera to my son (maybe at around 9 or 10 years old) that he could easily use. I always liked to see what things looked like from his point of view. His shots were so much closer to the ground – and generally looking up at me or other objects.