Olympus OM1 variants and wides

[nongfuspring]

I have heard some contents about Contax reliability. My Contax did die, but as I said, it had been through a house fire, and house fires are notoriously hard on any kind of electronics. When it worked, it was astounding.

I now have four FX 103s, since I like them so much. One to use, three for backups (done when you could get them off ebay for $10 to $20 apiece). They all still work. I particularly like the auto flash the Contax and Yashicas used. Prior to the 139Q and a TLA 20 and 30, I used flash fairly often, but almost never on auto, not even with Vivitar 283/5 nor Sunpak 522. But the auto flash in the Contax (now using a 167mt), and the FX103s, is unbelievably accurate. I have mentioned before I took photos of the inside of a burned out building one night, that were perfectly exposed. Talk about a black cat in a coal bin. 🙂

I hope you will let us know what you choose, and why, and your evaluation after using it for a while.

Will do. Just ordered a 28mm 2.8, and am just lurking for an appropriate OM1, it might take some time.

My frustration with the 139qs that I've had is that you're completely right, they are astounding, pretty much my ideal film camera. After looking inside of them though I'm not so surprised they don't have the best reputation for reliability - a fair amount of plastic, primitive looking exposed wires/PCBs and so on, some of the connecting circuits are even just pushed together to make connections. That said, the later Contaxes seem to have much better reputations for electronics, they just can't be serviced (my RX can get a bit squeaky at times).

Very happy to hear about the quality of the TTL! I've been seriously considering getting a flash lately.

 

[jcb4718]

I would echo the advice of David Hughes. I have several OM-1n's and have not had (or at least not noticed) any 'prism problems'. I had them modified to take SR44 batteries and occasionally the meter needed recalibrating but that said, they have proven to be reliable. However I wear glasses and as they say 'my eyesight is not getting any better'. I found that I had to fit a +1 dioptre to get a sharp viewfinder image (the OM 1n is -0.5 dioptre, I think) while wearing my glasses. The combination 0.92 magnification plus dioptre lens plus glasses meant I had to move my eye about just a bit too much to see the whole image in the viewfinder. I noticed OM 4's have become quite 'cheap' now on Ebay (if you patient), not all that more expensive than OM 1n's, so I bought a couple. They are a vast improvement on the OM 1n. I was careful to buy versions with 'OM 4Ti circuitry' to minimise battery drain. Critically in my case, it has dioptre adjustment in the eyepiece and only a 0.84 magnification. This combination means that even with my glasses I can just about see the whole image in the viewfinder: its ideal for me, in fact. I now use my OM 4 all the time.

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

That SR44 mod. is a good idea, I had it done on my old OM-1

But I do wish you hadn't mentioned the OM-4Ti as I am trying soooo hard to be sensible these days...

Regards, David

 

[jcb4718]

Oh...um...sorry!