Good morning;
Just as a minor clarification on Mike's comment about a Minolta 35mm SLR camera with an "Auto mode:" On the camera itself, this "Auto mode" might be represented with the letter "P" for "Program" mode. This came out on the X-700 and was found on very few Minolta manual focus cameras. It is a truly "Automatic Point and Shoot" mode for exposure with only manual focusing being required. This is the only mode where the MD lenses are required for that mode to work, but there is a way to work around even that.
A possible point of confusion exists between the Minolta Rangefinder and the Minolta SLR cameras, because Minolta did use the "A" designation for "Automatic" mode on the Minolta Hi-Matic 9 where there is an "A" setting for the lens aperture control ring, and an "A" setting for the shutter speed control ring. If you use just one of them, it will give you either an aperture priority mode or a shutter speed priority mode, depending on which you have chosen. If you set the aperture ring to "A," you get to choose the shutter speed, "shutter priority," and the Hi-Matic 9 would set the aperture for you automatically according to what the light meter wanted.
The interesting part is what happens when you set "both" the aperture ring and the shutter speed ring to "A." Then the Hi-Matic 9 does work in what Minolta called an "Automatic" mode according to a built-in program in the camera. Today we would call this a "Program" mode.
Later Minolta provided further possible confusion because there is both an "A" and a "P" on the shutter speed dial on the Minolta X-700. The "A" is for "Aperture" priority mode.
