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Sorry to hear about your film. Horrible.
… the images of my trip to Kiev and Chernobyl weren't shaved.
Not a roadie then? :)
I wrote some blurb about the Olympus OM that might be useful, either to you or others online thinking about picking one up.
The OM1 is a nice camera. It’s the SLR I’ve settled on after trying loads. It’s fully manual, mechanical, cloth curtain with an unobtrusive needle meter (the camera will work fine without the meter switched on). It’s selling point when it was introduced was that it was small and had a great viewfinder. It’s about the same size and weight as an M rangefinder or the 80s Pentax SLRs. The lenses were very good for the time and good today. Loads sold, so there are lots out there and not expensive.
There are a few things to be aware of;
Thing 1. The light-seal foam surrounding the prism will have degraded by now. It doesn’t ever need replacing but it can creep into the viewfinder and cause darkening/staining. All the cameras I’ve owned had this. The fix is fairly simple and worth doing as soon as you get the camera body: take the top-plate off the camera and swab the prism foam away (with a cotton bud and white spirit).
Thing 2. The M1, OM1 and OM1n were all designed for the meter to be powered by a tiny 1.25v cell. These are hard to find and the ones that exist are kinda shit. Use a silver oxide 1.5v. You can either compensate your metering or have the meter recalibrated by a technician. Or you could buy an OM2, which take 1.5v ok, has aperture priority, but you lose the classy battery-free operation and (I think) the shutter and metering is different.
Thing 3. Some people find setting the shutter speed with the left hand a little weird because that’s different to lots of SLRs. It’s unlikely this would be an issue unless you’d used other manual SLR brands for years.
And one thing I guess worth mentioning that applies to a few SLRs but particularly the Olympus OM … this was a system camera, so the focus screens are changeable (with loads of versions for specialist uses). For normal use you want a normal screen (there were a bunch but just something with and a split and micro prism). These are by far the most common. If you buy blind (eBay) you can easily end up with a camera you can’t focus until you track down a ‘normal’ screen.
miro_o-
Not a Roadie?
But thank you for the deep insight regarding both the om1/2 some food for thought as I go forward getting my first film camera. Is there a beginner's camera you would recommend though doesn't matter about age or brand but obviously the easier to use and the easier for me to get batteries and comman film sizes is best. I have a budget of around £150 so hopefully I could pick something up for that price.
Itsjustluke
Hi, iv recently been to Kiev and used a cheapo Kodak disposable camera..... Always loved how they pictures look and found it really fun to use. Unrelated. But took them to max speilman today to get them developed and on my return to collect them I saw the woman behind the counter looking nervous. Turned out the developer machine had broken and ruined all my film and the images of my trip to Kiev and Chernobyl weren't shaved. Anyway
I'm after a film camera to start shooting with and after a quick Google iv seen the Olympus 0m1 come up.... Worth getting as a beginner's film camera or?