One of the stranger cameras in the Olympus catalog, it features an all-plastic design centered around a sharp 35mm f/2.8 lens paired with a 4-blade aperture. The Olympus XA is a compact, aperture priority-only film rangefinder that debuted in 1979. Scour the secondary market today and you’ll still find a ton of OM-1s out there, fully functional and ready to shoot, which is a testament to Olympus’s efforts to make a durable, compact, and relatively affordable camera that would last decades with just a little bit of TLC. It even allows photographers to swap out the focusing screens through the lens mount, which means you don’t have to disassemble the camera to get a different view through the finder. Olympus built an air damping system into the shutter mechanism to cushion the impact from the mirror box as it flips up and down every time you take a photo. Both the aperture and shutter speed controls reside on the lens, so there’s no shutter dial on the compact, well-laid-out body.įire the shutter and you’ll also notice how quick and quiet the sound is.
Pick up an original Olympus OM-1 from the early 1970s and you’ll quickly notice some subtle differences between it and some of the other popular film SLRs of the time. With film prices what they are now, we can also appreciate getting twice the frames per roll. The Pen F feels old school because it is and that’s what we love about it. The original version requires two strokes of the advance lever in order to go to the next frame, similar to the original Leica M3.
Instead, Olympus built a system of mirrors inside the camera in order to keep the top of the body flat. There’s no pentaprism hump on top of the camera for a viewfinder. Load a 36-exposure roll of film into the camera and it will produce 72 vertically oriented photos that measure 24mm tall by 18mm wide. At the time, the Pen F was the smallest 35mm system camera, in large part because it only shoots frames that are half the size of a normal 35mm image. Released in 1963, the original Pen F looks like something you’d expect to see Don Draper from Mad Men toss in his bag along with his booze stash. What follows are nine of our all-time favorite models, from the half-frame Pen F to the Micro Four Thirds OM-D E-M1. And in the time since, there have been countless Olympus cameras worth celebrating for their innovations and/or sheer awesomeness. Olympus began manufacturing cameras all the way back in 1936 (one year before the first issue of Popular Photography magazine landed on newsstands). But wait, how did we get here? Last year, Olympus sold off its imaging division to Japan Industrial Partners, who then launched OM Digital Solutions with the intention of keeping the Olympus camera tradition alive.Īnd while we’re happy to see the DNA of the brand live on, this is a bittersweet moment. Earlier this week, Om Digital Solutions launched the OM System OM-1 Micro Four Thirds camera, the final camera ever to carry the Olympus badge.