Why I hope Minolta survives

Years ago, I saved up enough money to buy a new
"do everything" 35mm SRL called a Minolta XD-11.
It was awesome, the quality of it's pictures and the
accuracy of the thing (exposure, etc) was superb.
At the time, the complexity of SLR was just starting to
take off, and unlike the incomprehensible Canon A-1,
the Minolta seemed to have been given lots of thought.
Unfortunately, I broke the lens of a telescope I had
and had to replace it at pretty high cost so I ended
up selling the camera. Later, because I wanted to do
astrophotography, I bought the mainstay camera for that,
the Olympus OM-1 and stuck with it.
But Minolta genuinely seems to be interested in the consumer
if you look at the way they designed their current digital
SLR. Rather than cheap out on it, they chose a medium between
quality, functionality and price that at least put them at the
upper end of the basic DSLR market. Now they have the D5
out which is catering more to the novice crowd and yet it has
kept the main attributes of the D7. Good luck to them.

 

Unfortunately, quality control doesn't seem to be their strong suit. I really
wanted the 7D initially, but the initial reports of the 7D seemed to mirror the
A1, A2, and other K-M cameras I had followed where if you got a good camera all
was well, but you often had to go through 2-3 cameras before you got a good
one. Hopefully things have settled down for them quality wise.

 

Is it design flaws or production quality that's the problem?
-Rich

 

If it was design flaws than going through multiple cameras to find one that
works correctly would not find a working camera.