Konica Hexar

The Konica Hexar is a 35 mm fixed-lens, fixed focal length autofocus camera which was produced through the 1990s.

The lens on the Hexar is considered to be of high quality for this type of camera and is often compared with other high-quality lenses such as those from Leica.

The viewfinder uses projected parallax-corrected brightline framelines which shows the field of view to be captured when a photograph is taken.

The Hexar is similar in form to a Leica M mount camera with equivalent lens and handgrip fitted.

Construction is of cast-aluminium, finished in flat black or silver (later model), with a raised plastic hand-grip.

One notable feature of the Konica Hexar is its "silent mode", which can be selected by a button on the camera top plate, when powering up.

In Hexar Silver models, "silent mode" was disabled at the factory, apparently due to a dispute over intellectual property.

[1] This model can have silent mode re-enabled through a somewhat arcane set of "programming" steps that can be readily discovered through internet searches.

This means that manual camera settings (ISO value or exposure compensation) must be used to account for light reduction due to any filter fitted.

These models can have silent mode re-enabled through a somewhat arcane set of "programming" steps that can be readily discovered through internet searches.

[5] In 2006 Sony acquired photographic assets from Konica Minolta, with the latter company withdrawing from all photography-related activity.

It is not known whether Sony acquired other photographic assets such as film camera designs or whether those are retained by Konica Minolta.

Hexar with the original flash and lenscap attached
The original Hexar and the Hexar Silver