Pick up enough compact 35mm cameras from the mid-to-late 1960s and you might be easily mislead by the Minoltina-P into thinking you are holding a half frame camera.  Surely a smaller-than-normal camera like this must produce a smaller-than-normal negative?  It is not a bad assumption.  The 1960s saw many half frame cameras hit the market with a large part of their appeal coming from their smaller sizes and lighter weights.  Well, with the Minoltina-P Minolta managed to shrink the size of their typical 35mm camera while still keeping it full frame.  

Produced in 1964 by Minolta, the Minoltina-P is an ultra-compact, 35mm camera.  It predates the Olympus Trip 35, which it resembles, by a good three years.  With the Minoltina-P, Minolta hoped to create the perfect travel camera for the average photographer.  The Minoltina-P is small (5 inches long by 3 inches tall by a mere 2 inches deep) and light (15.5oz).  It fits easily into a coat pocket, handbag, backpack, or fanny pack.  In addition to its small profile, the Minoltina-P was also designed to be simple, easy and fast to use.  A built-in selenium cell light meter feeds a match needle display atop the camera.  As the needles in the meter window are aligned, shutter and aperture are simultaneously set together via an EV scale.  Focusing is done via a simple distance scale on the lens barrel or an even simpler three zone distance scale atop the camera and next to the meter display. After that it is merely a matter of bringing the camera to eye level to compose your shot and fire the shutter.  Once learned, this process would be easy to do and fast. You can see how Minolta envisioned this as being an ideal travel camera perfect for vacation snapshots.

The Minoltina-P is fitted with a nice 38mm f2.8 Rokkor lens.  The 38mm focal length is a fun one, offering a slightly wider field of view while avoiding ever feeling too wide angle.  The f2.8 max aperture is also fast enough to be versatile. In terms of performance, this Rokkor lens seems to hold its own.  It is not going to turn any heads though, for good or bad reasons.  It is sharp enough.  It is contrasty enough.  It may get a bit mushy at the edges with faster apertures but not blatantly so and its performance improves as smaller apertures are used.

What the Minoltina-P gives up is robust manual controls.  While the EV scale that is manually set does allow control over various shutter and aperture settings, these settings are paired and cannot be changed independently.  In other words, you can set the camera to faster shutter speeds but will be changing the aperture correspondingly.  So most shutter and aperture combinations will not be possible. The Minoltina-P offers manual aperture control by switching the dial over to the flash sync settings but those come with a fixed 1/30th shutter speed.  The Minoltina-P also lacks a rangefinder for critical focusing, requiring users to guesstimate distance in meters, feet or basic zones and hope the depth of field covers any errors.

It is not too common to see Minoltina-P cameras.  They were not made for very long.  The later Olympus Trip 35 for example turns up much more frequently.  Still, if you happen to come across one we think you will find yourself pleasantly surprised.