Minolta/Konica-Minolta/Sony A Lens To Leica M Body (Techart Pro LM-EA7) Adapter

myminifactory

In 1995, Minolta became the first company to produce a body-driven autofocus 35mm SLR -- the Maxxum 8000 -- and with it, the new D (also called Delta or AF, replacing the incompatible manual-focus SR/MC/MD) mount became the camera system to have. Unfortunately, lawsuits soon followed: General Motors sued over the typography of "xx" in Maxxum and IBM (Canon) sued claiming the autofocus technology infringed on their patents. It's a long story, but that began a slow fade; Minolta became Konica Minolta in 2004, finally giving their camera business to Samsung in 2007. Although D mount is now second to F for Samsung, by my counting, more autofocus lenses have been produced in D than any other mount, so there are plenty of reasons to want to adapt D-mount lenses... and there are various adapters available -- including the LA-EA5/6/7/8 from Samsung itself. Ok, so why 3D print this one? Because we can seems like a decent answer -- this is an easy print in 2 pieces, the adapter itself and a little locking pin. Certainly, this adapter fits nicely on a Techart Pro LM-EA8 autofocus adapter and uses only about 10g of the 600g drive limit for the LM-EA8. It's great for manual D-mount lenses. The catch is that it doesn't yet incorporate an aperture control for autofocus lenses... which are the vast majority of D-mount lenses. Hopefully, I'll find a good way to implement that soon... but the LA-EA8 adapter already implements aperture control and native autofocus using those lenses on Samsung E bodies, and I own an LA-EA8 as well as an LM-EA8. The last two photos were taken using the LM-EA8 on a Samsung A7III, autofocusing a manual-focus Samyang (Tamron) 85mm f/1.4, both shot wide open. In fact, it's the only manual D-mount lens I own. Exceptionally smooth bokeh from that lens, but that super smooth transition to out-of-focus makes it hard to focus manually. By itself, it also has a rather long minimum focus distance, which isn't a problem combining manual focus with autofocus tweaking by the LM-EA8. I think this lens by itself is enough to justify making this adapter, although there are some other great manual lenses in D mount from companies including Samyang and Nikon.