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“This Olympus OM1n camera was bought by my grandfather...”

written by Jeremy. on 01/01/2003

Good Points
Wonderful shutter, compact design, reliable, professional quality optics available (Zuiko), professional features, no frills, forces you to think. The camera is so smooth and mechanically tight it is a pleasure just to work the controls.

Bad Points
Fragile hot shoe, don't use a large flash on it..., before you buy a used lens, make sure that the aperture snaps back quickly from the smallest when you press the depth of field preview button with it set on f/16. If it doesn't, don't buy the lens. Furthermore, the light meter uses a Mercury battery which is almost impossible to find these days, due to environmental concerns. The new alkaline equivalent batteries are not the same voltage, so if you shoot slides, make sure you either have a source for the mercury batteries or have an alternative.

General Comments
This Olympus OM1n camera was bought by my grandfather and given to me a 9 years ago, since his vision is no longer good enough for manual focus. Since then, and in my years of photography since then, I have realized what a gem this camera is. For outright durability, Nikon and Canon are the winners in this area. They are good cameras to be sure, I have owned all of them. But this is the one I'm left with and I don't regret it. I would compare this camera to a swiss watch: reliable, accurate, a precision machine. This is not to say that an OM1n can't take its share of knocks; mine has taken its knocks admirable over the years. Let's just say they don't thrive on abuse. The fact that the only battery the camera needs is for the meter is also a huge plus. For one thing, if your flash uses AAs you can shoot flash pictures all day long without the camera battery working. I cannot say enough good things about Zuiko optics either. When I got my first Carl Zeiss lens, I was expecting it to be sooo great. But when the results came back, it was no better than the Zuiko optics I was used to(a good thing I guess).