BODY STYLES

Many Chinese/Minolta 35mm SLR cameras are exactly the same, except with a different brand name.  That's all.  They were made in the same factory, owned by the same company, and have the exact same features.  Only the name-plate is different -- and perhaps the company that sold them, and the country in which they were sold.

And there are many Chinese/Minolta 35mm SLR cameras are almost exactly the same, even if the have the same brand name.  They may have the same company name, but a different designation, or they may have a different company name and the same designation.  And then there are examples of the exact same camera with the exact same name, and the exact same designation -- with a different body style.  It is easy to assume that they are different cameras, when in reality they are the same.  Here are a few examples.

One major difference between the Chinese/Minolta cameras is in the hand grip.  Most of the earliest Chinese/Minolta cameras did not have hand grips, like this Peafowl DF.I:

But some early Chinese/Minolta cameras did have a hand grip, like this Seagull DF-102b:

When Seagull started making Minolta copies, that does not mean that they copied every aspect of the Minolta cameras.  Here is a Minolta X-300/X-370 compared to a Seagull DF-300.  

Everything about the two cameras is exactly the same except for the covering on the handgrip.  Some people like one, some the other.

Some hand grips became smaller, like the grip on the Safari DF-300:

Others were large, as on this Seagull DF-300H:

Some lost the leatherette in favor of a rubberized covering, like this Kalimar KX7000:

And some of the rubberized covering had grooves in them, as with the Texer EX-3:

Braun took a different approach and basically built the hand grip into the body of the camera, as with this SR2000 MD model:

Phenix liked the approach and used it on their DC20 SLR:

And here's an example of when the exact same camera from the exact same company appears with different hand grips -- the Soligor SR-300 MD: