Minolta Dynax 5

The most high-spec camera in the collection, launched in 2001. It feels more like a modern DSLR but with the added bonus that it shoots film.  It's incredibly light (335g body only), so there's no problem carrying it all day. It has the now familiar dial to choose whether you shoot the camera in manual, fully-auto, or semi-auto modes. It has drive modes (3 fps), built in flash, red eye reduction, remote shutter, and eye start feature. It also has auto focus and spot metering capabilities with a metering range of 1-20 EV, plus exposure compensation.  It needs two CR2 batteries to run.

Its kit lens is a 28-80mm AF Zoom that will focus down to 38cm, but obviously the lens is interchangeable (anything with the Minolta/Sony A mount). It auto loads the film and has a dx code reader. However, if you want to manually select ISO, say because you wanted to down rate some old film, you can do so. The viewfinder is nice and bright and there is an option for depth of field preview.

There are some pre-set modes that beginners may find useful, such as night photography, sports, portraits, close-ups etc. The aperture and shutter speeds are toggled with dials and you can see a read out of these in the viewfinder as well as the tiny screen on top of the camera.  It has a top shutter speed of 1/4000 and can happily do long exposures up to 30 seconds.

The instructions warn NEVER to load infrared film in the camera as the frame counter sensor will fog the film.

The most telling feature of this camera is probably the 126 page instruction manual that comes with it. It's packed full of gadgetry and clearly is in a different league to most of the rest of the collection.