There are two Minolta's X500's.
This is the Silver one which is more common and in some respects looks more obviously early 80's than it's all black cousin.
No: 60330174
The above is the original 1983 brochure introducing it with the black version shown coupled to the motordrive, a fast winder popular with professional and advanced amateurs into wildlife or sports photography.
In coy way the brochure spells out just what makes it the better bet for advanced amateurs and professionals than the X700, the top end model of the X series without drawing out the comparison relying on magazine reviews and users to it spell it out.
Having used both, I much prefer the X500 in the field while when it comes to accessories the two cameras use the same as you can use it without having to remove your eye from the viewfinder.
The loss of the Program mode is no great loss as it is a general all purpose program mode rather than having program shifts or preset modes dedicated more to sports and so on that were to become more common place in the late 80's and beyond and there's no need to have a exposure compensation dial to apply compensation, given you have metered manual to set one, a exposure lock to take and fix a substitute reading and in the final event, there's also just resetting the film speed to cause the exposure given to differ.
Minolta like a number of Japanese manufacturers had a flagship model in a series and then produced cut down versions offering certain core common features while removing others that amateur photographers with a limited budget didn't need or if made for certain specialty dealers to differentiate their model from the regular one.
The X500 introduced in April 1983 is a good example of this in that it lost the X700's Program exposure mode and the exposure compensation dial but retained all the other features of that model.
The program mode of the X700 was biased toward high shutter speed and wide apertures designed in the era of only Slr bodies giving you the ability to use zoom lens with compact camera like ease as in wind on, focus and click.
Where the X500 scores is it is better designed around the needs of the advanced amateur, indicating the shutter speed selected as well as the recommended one in metered manual exposure mode you'd use for landscape photography in the viewfinder rather than having take one eye from the viewfinder to check the shutter speed speed set as on the X700.
In practice this is much quicker making using it in manual really easy.
In its Aperture Priority auto exposure mode unlike the X300/370/X9 models the camera indicates first the likely shutter speed and at the point of taking the picture, sets the final used shutter speed for greater accuracy using an additional Spd cell.
Although it loses its exposure compensation settings on a dedicated dial, you can easily achieve the same result by temporarily resetting the film speed setting in third steps (which on a number of Olympus bodies of that era is the same thing merely marked up!).
Like the X700 it also keeps its TTL Of the film flash metering with suitable flash units.
Functionally I see it this body as more like a bit of plastic under the hood equivalent to Olympus's OM2 sharing the same modes and similar metering.
It was a unfortunate in all the fuss around the X700, the real strengths of this cut down version tuned more to the needs of advanced amateurs got lost.
Body no. 6080842
