Olympus Pen D3

[tomperson]

Hi all, I recently found an Olympus Pen D3 (f:1.7 32mm lens) at a local auction site. They're asking 30 US dollars for it, apparently working and in nice "cosmetic" condition. A few questions to the more experienced:

1) Any known "common problems" of these cameras? Flaws to look for?
2) Is the price right?
3) Does this camera allow for full manual control? It seems so, but i'd like to confirm before bidding.
4) This camera has a direct viewer, no rangefinder as far as I can tell. I'm interested in this camera because of its fast lens for available/low light photography. Given that low light photography will take me to bigger apertures (hence, smaller depth of field) I wonder what kind of results can I expect to get "guesstimating" distances? It seems like a critical aspect to me, in fact one that could break the deal...I'm more or less used to rangefinders and reflex cameras, and even guesstimating with russian cameras such as Lomo Smena Symbol, but I wonder wether I could guesstimate with such a small depth of field...I wonder what are your views regarding this...

Best regards.

 

[Al Kaplan]

I've owned a number of Pen cameras including the original D with the same lens. You should have no trouble scale focusing and getting nice sharp pictures. The camera is well built. The biggest problem is getting prints done from the automated min-labs because the 18 X 24 mm frame is considered non-standard.

 

[CameraQuest]

that camera sucks,
don't buy it,
who is selling it? url?

seriously,
it's a great camera.
buy it anything less than $100 in good working order
http://www.cameraquest.com/olypend2.htm

Stephen

 

[shadowfox]

Heed Stephen's website, the D3 is even better than my D2. And I paid way more than $30 😛

 

[jagarch]

I've just got one of these and it works fine. But to me the design is strange.
I understand how scale focusing works, and how to use zone focusing to estimate a region that will be in focus using a smaller f stop.
However, this camera has a fast lens of f1.7. That means you would get very limited depth of field at that f stop. Focusing is therefore even more critical.
To me the advantage of having the fast lens is negated by the disadvantage of having to scale focus.
To complicate things the camera only has a distance scale in meters and not in feet. The closest distances are therefore marked as 1.2, 1.1, 1.0, 0.9 meters, etc.
Who is going to be able to estimate a distinction between 1 and 0.9 meters at f1.7, where making that distinction is critical? It seems like a contradictory combination of features. Is this the fastest fixed lens scale focus camera? Maybe for good reason?
I know I can buy a separate rangefinder for this that fits in the flash shoe. But guess what? No flash shoe.

 

[shadowfox]

I've just got one of these and it works fine. But to me the design is strange.
I understand how scale focusing works, and how to use zone focusing to estimate a region that will be in focus using a smaller f stop.
However, this camera has a fast lens of f1.7. That means you would get very limited depth of field at that f stop. Focusing is therefore even more critical.
To me the advantage of having the fast lens is negated by the disadvantage of having to scale focus.

You are forgetting one thing. The Pen D series are half-frame cameras. Which means the size of the image recorded on film is half of a regular 35mm frame.

Therefore, in effect, the DOF will be apparent as longer/deeper than what it would be on a full-frame camera at a given aperture (in this case f1.7).