The Minolta SR-T 101 is a 35mm SLR camera made by Minolta Camera Co. Ltd, Japan, premiering in the March 1966 Japan Camera Show . Sales began in April 1966 and it stayed in production with only minor changes for ten years, the result of the thorough development effort that was put into the camera. The body is a direct continuation of the Minolta SR-7 model V of 1962, itself an innovative camera, with the addition of through-the-lens (TTL) metering and additional features.
Minolta combined significant innovations into the SR-T 101 TTL metering system including:
- weighted two cell CLC metering reading the upper and lower fields, which compensated for lighting contrasts between these fields;
- automatic full-aperture metering with compensation for shooting aperture;
- metering for combined aperture, shutter speed and film sensitivity settings, with exposure indicator needle, follower needle and shutter speed scale visible in finder;
- automatic aperture-range indexing when mounting a lens;
- meter power-off interlock, to prevent inaccurate metering in depth of field preview aperture stop-down mode.
While the 1963 Topcon RE Super pioneered full aperture metering and the 1964 Pentax Spotmatic used two cells for averaging metering, no other Japanese SLRs available in 1966 combined all of the above innovations.