You still use an OM1?

 A big plus of the OM1 is that you can take photos even without a battery. But if you want to flick the On/Off switch and use the exposure meter, you will need one. And therein lies a bit of an issue. When the OM1 was made, it took a mercury PX625 battery, giving 1.35v of power. But mercury batteries are no longer available, and that fact alone might put some people off using an OM1. However, various solutions are on hand. First of all, a WeinCell MRB625 is the same size & voltage. I have not tried one of these, but I have read that they only last a few months. Second option - modern batteries, the same size as the PX625, are available, but at a higher voltage of 1.5v. An example is the LR9 EPX625G. The higher voltage will cause the meter to read incorrectly (opinions vary on how much it will be out by), but by adjusting the film speed setting you can get it back in line again - a bit of testing on a sunny day should give you an idea of the change required. However...while alka...

Let's go back to 1972, when Olympus unveiled their new SLR camera, the M-1. It was smaller and lighter than other SLRs of the time, as the reduced size was one of the chief aims of the design team. It caused quite a stir, especially with the people at Leica, who objected to the M-1 and M System name. After all, they had been producing Ms for years. So, not long afterwards, the name was changed to OM. By then, quite a few M-1 cameras had left the factory - 52000 according to Olympus, and today any with that name on are worth quite a bit more than the OM-1 models which followed. Having said that, I saw one go on eBay for just £75 a few weeks ago, so you never know...  Of course, a few unscrupulous people might try to pass an OM-1 off as a rare M-1 - switch or alter the top plate and it's done. So a couple of things to check are the base plate, which should only have a battery compartment and no motor drive door, and the pressure plate inside the back, which was only about 50mm lo...

Well, yes I do. Although I haven't always used one. The saga of how I rediscovered film photography after too many years, and ended up with an Olympus OM1, has been the subject of two articles on the excellent 35mmc.com , here and here .  To cut a long story short, I bought an Olympus OM10 in 1981, traded up to an OM2SP a few years later, found small point & shoot machines more family-friendly, and then drifted away to digital and phones for far too long. The chance discovery of an old Olympus XA3 led me back, and I have come full circle to an OM1.  Why that one? The fact that I still had a couple of OM lenses from forty years ago meant that an OM camera made sense. I had spent a couple of years using even older cameras - a Kiev4a, a Contax2a, and several other purely manual cameras, so I wasn't looking for auto exposure, auto focus, bells & whistles. The considered opinion is that the single digit models are a bit more reliable after all this time, so the OM1 came c...