Konica Hexar AF
Konica Hexar AF: the quietest, cleverest fixed-lens 35mm anyone ever made
The Konica Hexar AF is one of those cameras whose reputation among the people who own one is wildly disproportionate to its public profile. It is, on the face of it, a 1993 fixed‑lens autofocus 35mm – the kind of "premium compact" that Japanese makers were turning out by the dozen in the early nineties as point‑and‑shoot got serious. Look closer and it turns out to be something rather odder: a 35mm rangefinder‑sized body with a Leica‑class lens permanently bolted to the front, an autofocus system more sophisticated than anything in a contemporary SLR, and a film advance and shutter so deliberately quiet that the manual actually calls one of the modes "silent". It is the camera that, three decades later, still has a small cult of owners who write about it the way Leica owners write about their M6s, and which currently sells secondhand for prices that have several times the Hexar's original 1993 retail. (Japan Camera Hunter)
It is worth making one thing clear right at the start, because Konica's own naming makes it confusing: this is the Hexar AF, the 1993 fixed‑lens autofocus camera, and not the Konica Hexar RF, which is a quite different interchangeable‑lens M‑mount rangefinder that came out at Photokina in 1999. Same brand, same general philosophy, completely different machine. Konica added the "AF" to the original Hexar's name retrospectively, after the RF launched, to make the distinction explicit. Where the RF is a serious tool for Leica refugees, the AF is what Konica's engineers built when somebody gave them a free hand and not enough adult supervision.
A short history of a slightly mad project
The Hexar AF arrived in 1993 from a Konica that, at the time, was a serious mid‑tier Japanese camera maker but no longer in the running with Canon and Nikon for the volume SLR market. They had been making rangefinders since the 1940s, had built the well‑regarded Hexar S compact and the Big Mini family of pocket compacts, and had a healthy line in disposable cameras that paid the rent. What the Hexar AF really was, in retrospect, was a passion project: a camera that the engineers in Tokyo wanted to make, supported by management who agreed that it might be worth doing even if it never sold in huge numbers. It cost roughly the price of an entry‑level SLR at launch and aimed itself squarely at people who already owned a Leica M and wanted something to carry when they didn't want to carry the Leica. (Camera Legend)
The original model was the black‑anodised Hexar AF of 1993, with its famous "silent mode" film advance and an exposure system that ran from aperture‑priority autoexposure through full program and manual. A more or less identical "Hexar AF Date" version added a databack a couple of years later. In 1997 Konica refreshed the camera as the Hexar AF Silver – chromed titanium body shell, slightly different switch arrangement, a marginally more polished firmware, and (to the disappointment of the cult that had grown up around the original) no advertised silent mode, though as it turned out the silent mode was still in there and could be unlocked by a sequence of button presses on power‑up. Then came the limited editions. The Hexar AF Classic in 1997 marked Konica's 120th anniversary with 2,000 silver‑and‑brown‑leather examples; a Gold version of 300 followed for some other anniversary; a Rhodium‑plated version with pink‑rose body and brown leatherette appeared in even smaller numbers; and an unofficial Titanium edition of around 1,000 numbered bodies in raw‑titanium finish was made for the Japanese market only. There is even, according to Japan Camera Hunter, a brown‑leather body that "officially never existed" but is occasionally seen in the wild. (Japan Camera Hunter: Konica Hexar Limited Editions)
Production ran from 1993 until around 2003, by which point Konica had merged with Minolta and was edging out of the camera business entirely (the merged Konica Minolta would sell its camera division to Sony in 2006). Total Hexar AF production is generally reckoned at somewhere in the low five figures across all variants, which is why a clean black original or Silver now asks $700 to $1,000 on the used market, and a Rhodium or Gold goes for vastly more.
The lens: 35mm f/2 UC‑Hexanon, with a 1950s pedigree
The single most important thing about the Hexar AF is the lens, and the lens deserves a paragraph or two of its own.
Mounted permanently on the front of every Hexar AF is a 35mm f/2 Konica Hexanon, sometimes called the UC‑Hexanon ("UC" for "ultra coated") in Konica's literature. Seven elements in six groups, multi‑coated, 46mm filter thread, close focus 0.6m, fixed aperture range from f/2 to f/22 in half‑stop clicks. The lens has a small built‑in retracting lens hood that pulls out of the front of the barrel and clicks into place, which is one of those small thoughtful touches that the rest of the camera is full of. (Lomography)
That description sounds unremarkable until you understand where the optical formula came from. The 35mm f/2 Hexanon is, by Konica's own statements at the time and by the analysis of a small subset of lens nerds who have measured the thing properly, a direct optical descendant of the Nippon Kogaku W‑Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 of 1956 – an extremely highly regarded screw‑mount lens made in small quantities for the Nikon S‑mount rangefinders and for Leica thread mount. Konica took that design, reworked it for modern multilayer coatings and modern aspheric grinding tolerances, and re‑prescribed the back focal length to suit the Hexar's body geometry. The result is a 35mm f/2 lens that, when both have been carefully measured against each other, holds its own against a 35mm Summicron‑M of the same period and which several Leica owners have, somewhat sheepishly, said they prefer. (David De, Rangefinder Forum)
There is a postscript to this. In 2001 Konica produced a separate M‑mount version of essentially the same optical formula, the M‑Hexanon 35mm f/2, sold for use on the Hexar RF and on Leica M bodies, and which is widely considered one of the best 35mm f/2 lenses anyone has ever made. The Hexar AF's lens is, in optical terms, that same lens, just glued into a fixed mount in front of a leaf shutter. Owners of the Hexar AF who eventually trade up to a Hexar RF often discover, slightly to their irritation, that they have spent significant money to get back the same lens they already had.
In use, the 35mm f/2 Hexanon does what the best fixed wide‑normals do: stays sharp from wide open, holds its corners better than any 35mm zoom of its period, has very low geometric distortion (about 0.5% barrel), and renders out‑of‑focus areas with a slightly understated smoothness that suits black‑and‑white film particularly well. Vignetting at f/2 is around a stop in the corners and clears up by f/4. Flare resistance is, given the period, surprisingly good – the multi‑coating and the retracting hood between them keep most stray light off the elements.
The body: titanium, leatherette and considered density
The Hexar AF in the hand is a slightly heavier camera than its size suggests. The body shell is titanium throughout – not the magnesium‑alloy‑with‑titanium‑top‑plate that most "titanium" cameras of the period actually are, but properly titanium for the whole exterior. The original 1993 black model has its titanium anodised black; the Silver from 1997 has the same titanium chromed; the Classic, Gold and Rhodium variants are differently plated again but built on the same underlying titanium chassis. Weight is around 490g for the body alone, rising to about 575g with film and battery. The grip is genuine leather (not leatherette) on the original and most limited editions, with the textured rubber‑over‑metal grip on the Silver being the small visible giveaway of the later model.
Form factor is squarely Leica‑M‑shaped, but a touch wider and a touch shallower – about the size of a Leica M6 with the bottom‑plate removed. The lens sits forward of the body in its own slightly raised flange, with the lovely retracting hood already mentioned, and a small chrome‑ringed AF illumination window above and to the right of the lens. Two small windows above the lens flank a central front‑facing IR emitter, and the rangefinder eyepiece sits at the rear, in the corner where you'd expect it on a Leica.
The top plate carries the camera's main controls in the dense Japanese‑1990s vernacular: a combined power / mode dial on the right with positions for AUTO (aperture priority), program, and manual; the combined aperture dial with central shutter release button, a pair of multi-purpose selection buttons, and the hot shoe just left of centre. A small LCD panel on the top right shows frame count, ISO, exposure compensation, focus distance and various status flags. Just behind the LCD, there are several small buttons for film rewind, Select, MF, and self-timer. The top plate has roughly twelve controls, which is dense but not cluttered; everything is where you'd look for it after a roll or two.
The back of the camera is much simpler. The rangefinder eyepiece sits on the left, and the film door takes up the rest of the rear panel, with a single rotating door release on the left‑hand side of the camera body. The bottom plate holds the battery compartment for the single 2CR5 lithium cell, under the handgrip, with a tripod socket off-centre. The 2CR5 sits behind a screw‑off door – not a hatch, an actual threaded cap – which is one of the small detail differences from cheaper compacts of the same era.
The autofocus system, which is genuinely insane
This is the part of the Hexar AF that, twenty‑plus years on, still surprises people who read the spec sheet properly.
Konica's autofocus on this camera is an active infrared system – it projects an invisible IR beam from the front of the body, bounces it off the subject, and measures the angle of return on a small sensor. So far, so 1980s; almost every compact camera of the period worked roughly like that. What makes the Hexar AF's system unusual is the level of refinement Konica brought to it:
It uses a two‑channel receiver, with two separate IR sensors flanking a central emitter. The two‑channel arrangement lets the camera triangulate against the centre emitter, which means it can detect and correct for the small parallax error that single‑channel systems are prone to, and it can also detect inconsistencies in the return beam (caused by, for example, a strongly tilted reflective surface) and adjust for them.
The focus mechanism has 290 discrete distance steps between 0.6m and 10m, with infinity selected automatically beyond 10m. This is an extraordinary number for an active IR system of this period; most contemporary AF compacts used 30 to 60 steps.
Konica's white paper on the system documents an aperture‑specific focus shift correction: every fast lens experiences a small shift in focus distance as it is stopped down, and the Hexar AF measures the user‑set aperture and applies the corresponding correction to the AF result. Hardly any cameras did this then, and very few do it now.
The system is temperature‑compensated, with an internal thermistor adjusting AF calibration to allow for thermal expansion of the lens barrel.
It can be set to compensate for infrared film at 750nm or 850nm, by shifting the focus point automatically to the IR plane and removing the usual hand‑calculated IR focus offset that traditional cameras required.
The system focuses in complete darkness, because it's projecting its own infrared light source. This is a feature you only really appreciate the first time you take the camera into a dimly lit pub and find that everything is in focus regardless. (The Machine Planet)
There is one limitation: because the system is active and projects an IR beam, it has a working range of about ten metres. Beyond that it defaults to infinity, which the camera correctly assumes is the hyperfocal distance of a 35mm f/2 lens stopped down to f/8 anyway. If you specifically need 10m‑to‑infinity focus dialed in by hand, the MF button gives it to you in one press.
The autofocus is also, by 1993 standards, remarkably fast – Konica's published figure is around 0.2 seconds from press to focus lock under normal lighting, which is competitive with much later systems – and remarkably accurate. The two‑channel triangulation is what really sets it apart; on a contemporary single‑channel IR compact, focusing on a person against a window or a person against a brightly lit background often fails. On the Hexar AF it usually doesn't.
Silent mode, and the secret button sequence
The other thing the Hexar AF is famous for is the audio side of the equation. The leaf shutter is essentially inaudible at all speeds, which most leaf shutters are, but the film advance and the focus drive are usually the loudest things on any AF compact. Konica solved this by fitting an unusual servo‑driven film transport that can run in a deliberately slow "silent mode", where each operation takes about three seconds and produces almost no audible noise. The shutter clicks at a level that, in a quiet room, is about as loud as a soft tongue‑click against the roof of the mouth. The autofocus is silent (it's a piezoelectric drive). The film advance, in silent mode, is the quietest motorised advance ever fitted to a 35mm camera.
There is, however, a small piece of camera lore that any serious Hexar AF owner needs to know. On the original 1993 black model, the silent mode is a labelled position on the top‑plate film advance lever. On the 1997 Silver and later models, Konica decided that silent mode was no longer a marketing feature and removed it from the published controls – but the firmware still supports it, and it can be unlocked by a specific button sequence on power‑up. Press the MF button while turning the mode dial from off to manual, then press it again four times, and the camera enters a hidden service menu that, among other things, lets you enable silent mode permanently. The sequence has been documented online for years and is well known among Hexar AF owners; it is essentially official Konica firmware behaviour, just undocumented in the manual. The combination of "premium camera" and "secret button sequence" is one of the reasons the camera has the small cult following it does. (CameraQuest)
The shutter, and the one frustrating limit
Almost every review of the Hexar AF, after fifteen paragraphs of praise, gets to the same caveat. The shutter is a leaf shutter mounted inside the lens, electronically timed, with a working range of 30 seconds to 1/250th of a second, and a bulb mode. That top speed is the one place where the camera shows its age. With Tri‑X 400 in bright sunlight at f/2, you simply cannot use the lens wide open: the meter will refuse to fire, or the camera will close the aperture for you. Even at f/4 you're at the edge of usable in midday sun on ISO 400 film.
The technical reason is that leaf shutters get exponentially harder to make as the top speed rises; the blades have to physically open, expose, and close in a fraction of a millisecond, and the larger the clear aperture, the more difficult the geometry. The Hexar AF's leaf shutter has to clear the f/2 35mm Hexanon's relatively large aperture, and 1/250s was apparently the limit Konica's engineers could reach without compromising the shutter's reliability. The compensation, which most owners find acceptable, is that the leaf shutter syncs with flash at every speed, which is a creative tool worth having.
The workaround for fast film in bright light is the obvious one: carry a polariser or a couple of stops of neutral density filter, or shoot ISO 100 film. None of which is ideal, but none of which is a deal‑breaker.
What it's like to use, three decades on
The Hexar AF, switched on, lights up its top‑plate LCD with the current frame count and ISO. Half‑press the shutter and the camera focuses inaudibly, displays the distance in the rangefinder, and meters the scene. Full press, and the shutter clicks softly. In silent mode, the film advances over the next three seconds with no perceptible noise; in normal mode it takes about half a second with a soft whirr. The combined effect is a camera that you can use, genuinely, anywhere – in a concert hall, in a church during a service, in a restaurant booth – without anyone noticing you have a camera at all.
The viewfinder is bright, with parallax‑corrected frame lines, a focus confirmation arrow and the in‑finder LCD that shows shutter speed and metering bias. There is no rangefinder coupling because the AF does the focusing; the finder is purely for composition and confirmation. The 35mm f/2 Hexanon is genuinely an exceptional lens. The titanium body is light enough to carry all day and tough enough to drop. The 2CR5 battery still costs about £5 and is still available everywhere. The film door seals are reliable.
Set against that, the things that ail any twenty‑plus‑year‑old electronic camera. The Hexar AF's main electronic risk is the LCD on the top plate, which fades to indecipherability after long sun exposure on some examples and which is essentially unreplaceable. The infrared focus emitter very rarely fails, but when it does the camera is unrepairable outside one or two specialist workshops. The leaf shutter solenoid eventually wears out at around 50,000 actuations. And, of course, the 1/250s top speed remains the 1/250s top speed.
But none of that is really the point. The Konica Hexar AF was Konica's engineers' attempt, in 1993, to make the best fixed‑lens 35mm camera they possibly could, more or less without regard to commercial reality – a Leica with an autofocus brain and a Hexanon up front. Three decades later it remains, by most measures, exactly that: a 35mm camera with a Summicron‑class lens, an autofocus system that does things SLR makers have largely forgotten how to do, and a silent mode that nothing else has ever quite matched. If you ever see a clean one in any of its variants for sensible money, take it home. There aren't many of them, and they aren't getting cheaper.
