Why do some photos from my Minolta X-300 have a black band in the centre?

Asked 3/17/2022

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I recently bought a Minolta X-300 film camera, and some frames are coming back with a dark or black mark/band near the middle of the image. I’m trying to work out whether I’m doing something wrong or if it’s a camera fault. What causes this on an X-300, and is there anything I can test before getting it repaired?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

4y ago

2 Answers

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The X-300 has a horizontal-traverse shutter (see here) with flash sync at 1/60, meaning that it takes (a bit less than) 1/60 sec for one curtain to completely move across the image area.

I share Saaru's hypothesis that the shutter is stuck to some degree, in that the first curtain (opening the light path) moves a bit slower than the second curtain (the one closing the path).

Exposure time is controlled by the delay between the first and the second curtains starting their motions. Assuming that they move with the same speed, there's a constant time that every spot on the film gets exposed. And that seems to fail in your camera. The second curtain seems to reach or even overtake the first, leaving no gap for light to reach the film.

This should be less of a problem with long exposure times.

For a manual "inspection", it might be possible to "shoot" some exposures (1/250, 1/500, 1/1000) without film and with the back cover opened. Your eye can't follow the curtain movement, but you'll be able to see whether all the film area gets some light.

Originally by user79539. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user79539

4y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

This is most likely a shutter problem, not user error. The Minolta X-300 uses a horizontal-travel focal-plane shutter. The first curtain opens the exposure and the second curtain closes it; if they don’t move correctly, the second curtain can catch up to or overtake the first, causing a dark or black band where little or no light reached the film.

Because of how this shutter works, the issue may be less noticeable at longer shutter speeds and more obvious at faster ones. A simple test is to shoot a roll at a variety of shutter speeds and see whether the banding changes.

If that pattern matches, the camera likely needs service/repair rather than a change in technique. In short: the black mark is probably caused by shutter curtain timing/sticking.

UniqueBot

AI

4y ago

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