Modifying meter ASA range in Olympus Pen EE series

[cluso]

Hi,
I recently got hold of an old Olympus Pen EE-S. It came in pretty average condition, but I got it fully restored and working again 🙂

Two questions:
Why is the ASA range from 10 to 200? 25 ASA films are quite rare nowadays, were films of that ASA range more common back in the 60s? And was 200 kind of the upper limit of films to buy, or is it due to the slowest shutter speed of 1/200? The Olympus 35 SP, for example, goes up to 800 and is not much younger.

I find the maximum of 200 ASA quite limiting and would much prefer a 400 ASA setting on the Pen EE-S. I have seen that there is a resistor in the line, so I thought it should be possible to move the sensitivity of the entire ASA range up by changing its resistance, e.g. from 20 to 400 instead from 10 to 200. Do you think this would work, and how I figure out the resistance I need? I haven't measured the one that's in there yet.

Thanks!

 

[DaCh]

I wonder why they did that, maybe 400asa was not common in Japan but it certainly was everywhere else, they realised eventually and changed the range to 25-400 on later models.
Your camera will take 22.5mm filters that only cover the lens and not the meter; so if you added a one stop neutral density filter you could use 400 with the camera set at 200. A one stop ND will be either called ND2 or ND 0.3 (funny old world, there always has to be two ways to do everything)

 

[MartinP]

The range on my Pen-EE is, not surprisingly, 10-200 as well. Ten asa would have been Kodachrome and 100asa was 'fast' black and white film. Times have changed. You could always pull your Tri-X a stop and get slightly improved quality, especially given that the neg is half-frame.

Remember also that the shutter speed range on these things is fixed, so if you need to lose a stop of light then it will be only via the aperture. You could end up with everything in focus, all the time - in fact, my EE depends on this as the lens is fixed-focus!

 

[Dwig]

...
Why is the ASA range from 10 to 200? 25 ASA films are quite rare nowadays, were films of that ASA range more common back in the 60s?...

Film has changed quite a bit in the nearly half century since the Pen EE-s was introduced in 1962. At the time, very few 35mm films would have had speeds outside of the 10-200 range.

In 1962, Kodacolor was ASA 25. The improved Kodacolor-X, at ASA 80, wasn't introduced until a year later. Kodachrome (ASA 10) was soon to be discontinued and the new Kodachrome II (ASA 25) had been introduced just a year earlier. The "super-fast" Kodachrome-X (ASA 64) was also a 1962 introduction. In 1962, the only faster Kodak color film was High Speed Ektachrome at ASA 160.

Kodak's B&W line included Panatomic-X (ASA 32) and Tri-X (ASA 400), but the common amateur B&W at the time was Plus-X (ASA 125). Only Tri-X falls outside of the metering range of the Pen EE-S, and Tri-X would not have been a likely film choice for the type of photographer that would buy a Pen in 1962.