Almost 40 years ago, Olympus made a great leap forward in SLR camera design with the introduction of the OM-1 camera (initially they called it the M-1, but Leica didn’t like that and threatened to sue.)\u00a0 It wasn’t a camera for everyone, with many pros complaining it was too small and too light to be serious, and certainly it didn’t have the tank-like qualities of some of the rival models. It was relatively small and light and came with a superbly bright viewfinder and a pretty decent set of lenses, some of which made the big guns look pretty sick.<\/p>\n
The OM1 had its faults. It didn’t show the aperture in the viewfinder. Photographers used to having the shutter speed dial on top of the camera didn’t like the far better placement around the lens mount which meant you didn’t have to lose your grip on the camera to alter the shutter speed. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on.\u00a0 Probably its weakest point was just a slight ‘iffiness’ at times about the shutter release, which could sometimes mean nothing happened when you pressed it the first time (something we are rather more used to when cameras have autofocus, but there was no reason for it in the manual days.)<\/p>\n
By the time it had developed into the OM4 it was a real classic, and I had two of them together with a pretty comprehensive lens set in a very much smaller and lighter bag than I now need for the two Nikons. The OM4 had what was certainly the best metering system ever made for any film SLR, and was great for those who liked to think about exposure, allowing you to place an area on a particular zone with ease. Or you could just leave it on automatic, and it seemed to do better than the rather more complex electronic systems manage now.<\/p>\n
Now Olympus are sending out teasers about a new OM series camera, the OM-D, supposedly a digital successor to the OM series. I think it has come around 10 years too late, but I hope I won’t be too disappointed.\u00a0 You can read more about the likely spec at 43 Rumours<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’m afraid the similarity will largely be cosmetic, an attempt to trade on the old reputation. Of course it won’t have anything like such a good viewfinder – it will be electronic. I suspect too that the dial we see a little of on the top plate is a shutter speed dial.<\/p>\n We already know more about another new camera, the Fuji\u00a0 X-Pro1<\/em>, also with a 16Mp sensor, though the slightly larger APS-C format, and one that promises to produce sharper images with a different sensor layout which cuts down the effect of moire. That looks rather more interesting as a camera, and is obviously aping Leica – just as the Fuji X-100 was. The X-Pro1 with its interchangeable lenses looks very much like the camera the Leica M9 should have been, so I’m waiting with rather more interest the first detailed reviews. So far the various ‘hands-on’ pieces although interestin<\/a>g really tell us only a little more than the press release.<\/p>\n But I’m already getting the feeling that this might just be the year I jump ship from Nikon to something smaller and lighter, at least for much of my work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost 40 years ago, Olympus made a great leap forward in SLR camera design with the introduction of the OM-1 camera (initially they called it the M-1, but Leica didn’t like that and threatened to sue.)\u00a0 It wasn’t a camera for everyone, with many pros complaining it was too small and too light to be … Continue reading OM Rebirth?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}